Analyzing students’ collaboration patterns in a social learning environment using StudentViz platform

Abstract

Understanding students’ collaboration patterns is an important goal for teachers, who can thus obtain an insight into the collaborative learning process. Social network analysis and network visualizations are commonly used for exploring social interactions between learners. However, most existing network visualization platforms are deemed too complex by the teachers, who do not possess social network analysis expertise. Therefore, we propose an easy to use platform for visualizing students’ collaboration patterns, called StudentViz. An overview of the tool, including a description of its implementation and functionalities, is provided in the paper. An illustration of how the tool can be used in practice, for investigating students’ collaboration patterns in a social learning environment, is also included.