Social Network Platforms in Educational Settings: A Network Analysis Approach to Analyze Online Student Interactions

Abstract

Interactions create webs of interconnected activities, and may give rise to emergent phenomenon. The word interaction in educational settings refers to person-to-person communication, and thus exists in in-class discussions, in-class debates, and so forth. Educational settings that emerge from such collaborations give rise to a network of interactions among the stakeholders involved. This paper briefs an exploration on the concepts of social network analysis and their ability to shed light on the impacts of incorporating social network platforms in educational settings. In this paper we try to analyze the information flow based on undergraduate and graduate student online interaction patterns. An online Facebook group was created as a part of this study to initiate a computer mediated communication platform for the geographically separated students to connect and engage in classroom based meaningful discussions. We use Netvizz, a data extraction tool to collect data from student groups in Facebook social networking platform. The networks constructed using the data gathered at five random time steps are analyzed using individual node degrees both qualitatively and quantitatively for understanding the interaction patterns observed.