The growth of social media has given rise to many informal online communities. In these communities, people communicate, make connections, exchange information and transfer knowledge without time or location restrictions. The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate both lurkers' and posters' perceptions of learning in Reddit-based education-related communities. A mixed-method approach was used to obtain an overall understanding of how members perceived learning and the differences between posters and lurkers. Eighty-two participants (43 posters and 39 lurkers) were recruited from education-related subreddits and nine of them (5 posters and 4 lurkers) were interviewed. The results showed that there was no significant difference in the perceptions of learning between posters and lurkers. Both lurkers and posters believed that they have learned in these communities, and both defined learning in these communities as changing behaviours or thinking or applying what they have learned to real-life situations. Although both lurkers and posters reported having learned in the communities, qualitative analysis of the interview data indicated that posters demonstrated higher learning levels than lurkers. The findings of this study offer implications for further research into how members perceive learning in informal social media-based communities.