Social Network Analysis of ECI Discussion Forum Using Node XL

For several units of the ECI-519 course (Learning Analytics) taught at NC State,
students participate in an online discussion in order to expand their understanding of course
content by exchanging student reaction, understanding, and application of the course material
with one another. Each discussion topic is guided by a core set of questions, and students are
also welcome to add their own questions for the class to collectively address (Kellogg, S.,
Moodle Site, 2016).

Students are not expected to address every question raised in the discussions, and they
are encouraged to pace themselves in the discussion by participating on various days versus
adding to the discussions all in one day.

For this discussion activity, I wanted to determine how interactive the students were
during this discussion and if students responded to a variety of peers class or if they repeatedly
responded to the same peer(s) within the class.

The data imported into Node XL showed that there were 16 students, or vertices in this
network:
 At first glance, it appears that the students communicated, or interacted, with a variety of
their peers. To determine the strength of the relationships within this network (i.e., how
frequently 2 students interacted), I calculated edge weight and adjusted the size of the edges,
based on the weight:

The strongest tie was 9, and out of the 176 edges, 9 were weighted between 5 and 9 (as
shown in red). This means that were a select number of relationships in which peers
communicated back and forth within the forum, but most of the time the interactions were fairly
widespread:
 This data identified students by a user ID, but what would enhance this social network
analysis is to identify student characteristics beyond a user ID. For example, adding
characteristics such as professional background, years of experience and education level to the
student would allow us to determine information such as: Do students communicate with those
of similar background? Do these characteristics affect the level of interaction (for example,
those with more years of experience may communicate more)?
With the data provided, I conclude that some students developed strong relationships
with a select number of peers, the class in general interacted with a variety of peers. This
activity seems to have met its objectives in terms of creating an online discussion forum for
which students communicate and learn from one another.