Collaborative Learning of Students in Online Discussion Forums: A Social Network Analysis Perspective

Many courses are currently delivered using Course Management Systems (CMS). Discussion forums within these systems provide the basis for collaborative learning. In this chapter, we present the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to analyze the structure of interactions between the students in these forums. Various metrics are introduced for ranking and determining roles, while clustering and temporal analysis techniques are applied to study the student communications, the forming of groups, the role changes, as well as scrutinizing the content of the exchanged messages. Our approach provides the instructor with better means to assess the participation of students by (1) identification of participants’ roles; (2) dynamic visualization of interactions between the participants and the groups they formed; (3) presenting hierarchy of the discussed topics; and (4) tracking the evolution and growth of these patterns and roles over time. The applicability of the proposed analyses are illustrated through several case studies.