The aim of this work is to investigate the relations between social networks and students’ performance in two
distributed learning communities. When a learning community is geographically distributed, opportunities for the
learner to engage with peers in a collaborative environment are problematic given the lack of spatial and temporal
requirements associated with traditional classroom settings (Dawson, 2008). In these contexts, it is even more
pertinent the concern for a social structure that supports an environment of sharing and collaboration, since
knowledge sharing does not occur so spontaneously as when a working group shares the same physical space
(Gutwin et al., 2007; Zheng & Yano, 2007). In order to better understand social capital and how social network could
be related to the outcomes, we analysed the role that social network structure can have on students’ performance.
Descriptive information on the communities’ social network is presented and the correlations between students’
social network characteristics and students’ performance are analysed.