Competency 4.1

Competency 4.1: Describe and critically reflect on approaches to the use of social network analysis for the study of learning.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is an useful tool to sketch out and analyse within a social network, its constituents, structure and the inter-relationship of the constituents.  Learning, by and large, is an interactive activity within a community (be it a Mass Open Online Course or a classroom-based lecture).

By consolidating and analysing the data pertaining to the learning community using SNA approaches will facilitate a scientific examination of the features of the community, its structure, might as well the characteristics of its participants.

These approaches will greatly enhance understanding of the learning processes and the learners, deepen what works well and what destroys value to the learning processes.  Insight can also be illuminated from the SNA findings to support teaching staff in providing appropriate support and/or intervention to learners.  These insight should also shed light to educators in designing learning curricula that meets the knowledge state of the learners and tailors the delivery approach to suit the peculiar circumstances of the learning environment.

 

The impact of social network analysis on educational constructs like learning design, sense of community, creative potential, social presence, academic performance and MOOC pedagogy looks promising. The possible data sources could be discussion boards, course enrollments, twitter and other social networks data, self-reports or course design. Metrics like network density, degree centrality, eccentricity, modularity etc. help us to get an idea about the network of and individuals in a network.

Learning design could affect students’ activities in a big way. Students who are familiar with a design are generally more comfortable using it. To see if students in a course are learning as expected, we can monitor them using SNA and guide them as needed. We can see at what stage the instructor's role is more important than peer-facilitation by seeing the interactions and provide help to students.

Monitoring the sense of community will be useful in identifying isolated groups/ individuals who may not receive all information. We can in such cases guide them to be part of larger communities. We can also advise students to join new groups for assignments to get connected to more students. These factors can impact the creative potential, social presence and academic performance of students if suitable help is provided. Awareness of more ways of communication and their usefulness should be advocated to students to help them understand the distributed structure of MOOCs and be better involved. 

Educators must, nevertheless, be mindful of a key consideration when applying SNA approaches in the context of “self-help” learning.  The study of learning using the SNA approaches rest on the productiveness of learners to participate and therefore “behave” during the learning processes.  In the worst scenario where certain learners are “inert” in the processes, SNA approaches might be too remote to provide adequate data for the analysis and thus fail to illuminate situation to fuel the study of learning.