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

Full Text: BC13Collaborative.pdf PDF

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.

Citation

R. Rabbany, S. ElAtia, M. Takaffoli, O. Zaiane. "Collaborative Learning of Students in Online Discussion Forums: A Social Network Analysis Perspective". Series: Studies in Computational Intelligence, Educational Data Mining: Applications and Trends, Springer, (ed: Alejandro Peña-Ayala), 524, pp 1-25, October 2014.

Keywords: Social Network Analysis, Student Participation Assessment, Student Monitoring, Content Summarization, Discussion Forums
Category: In Book
Web Links: Webdocs

BibTeX

@inbook{Rabbany+al:14,
  author = {Reihaneh Rabbany and Samira ElAtia and Mansoureh Takaffoli and
    Osmar R. Zaiane},
  title = {Collaborative Learning of Students in Online Discussion Forums: A
    Social Network Analysis Perspective},
  Booktitle = {Educational Data Mining: Applications and Trends},
  Publisher = "Springer",
  Editor = {Alejandro Peña-Ayala},
  Volume = "524",
  Pages = {1-25},
  year = 2014,
}

Last Updated: February 05, 2020
Submitted by Sabina P

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