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Analyzing Participation of Students in Online Courses Using Social Network Analysis Techniques

Full Text: edm11.pdf PDF

There is a growing number of courses delivered using e-learning environments and their online discussions play an important role in collaborative learning of students. Even in courses with a few number of students, there could be thousands of messages generated in a few months within these forums. Manually evaluating the participation of students in such case is a significant challenge, considering the fact that current e-learning environments do not provide much information regarding the structure of interactions between students.There is a recent line of research on applying social network analysis (SNA) techniques to study these interactions. And it is interesting to investigate the practicability of SNA in evaluating participation of students. Here we propose to exploit SNA techniques, including community mining, in order to discover relevant structures in social networks we generate from student communications but also information networks we produce from the content of the exchanged messages. With visualization of these discovered relevant structures and the automated identification of central and peripheral participants, an instructor is provided with better means to assess participation in the online discussions. We implemented these new ideas in a toolbox, named Meerkat-ED. Which prepares and visualizes overall snapshots of the participants in the discussion forums, their interactions, and the leader/peripheral students. Moreover, it creates a hierarchical summarization of the discussed topics, which gives the instructor a quick view of what is under discussion. We believe exploiting the mining abilities of this toolbox would facilitate fair evaluation of students’ participation in online courses.

Citation

R. Rabbany, M. Takaffoli, O. Zaiane. "Analyzing Participation of Students in Online Courses Using Social Network Analysis Techniques". International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM), (ed: Mykola Pechenizkiy, Toon Calders, Cristina Conati, Sebastián Ventura, Cristóbal Romero, John C. Stamper), pp 21-30, July 2011.

Keywords:  
Category: In Conference
Web Links: dblp

BibTeX

@incollection{Rabbany+al:EDM11,
  author = {Reihaneh Rabbany and Mansoureh Takaffoli and Osmar R. Zaiane},
  title = {Analyzing Participation of Students in Online Courses Using Social
    Network Analysis Techniques},
  Editor = {Mykola Pechenizkiy, Toon Calders, Cristina Conati, Sebastián
    Ventura, Cristóbal Romero, John C. Stamper},
  Pages = {21-30},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM)},
  year = 2011,
}

Last Updated: January 14, 2020
Submitted by Sabina P

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