GraphFES: A web service and application for moodle message board social graph extraction

Abstract

This chapter introduces GraphFES, a Web service and application that processes data from forum activity in Moodle courses and transforms them into social graphs to enable social learning analytics in Gephi, a social network analysis application. The chapter gives an overview of social learning analytics in online and computer-supported collaborative learning and describes existing tools for social network analysis of educational data. The chapter also presents the main concepts associated to the data source (Moodle logs) and target (Gephi), and a more detailed explanation of GraphFES’s design and operation. An example with data from two courses illustrates how GraphFES and Gephi can combine to carry out social learning analytics in Moodle courses. The final section discusses the potential of this approach for effective social learning analytics.