Visual Analysis of Online Interactions through Social Network Patterns

In this article we present a system capable of graphically representing the interactions between students and teachers in hierarchical online forums. By defining the a´reply-to´ relation between the users the system builds a graph. During forum posts mining, the system computes metrics taken from social network analysis which are then applied to the graph drawing process. This system brings up new possibilities to e-learning as a tool capable of helping the teacher assorting and illustrating the degree of participation of students; to identify key students in information passing, and to find the implicit relations between forums participants. Preliminary tests lead to the conclusions that the system is able to rapidly help in identifying situations like outliers, sources and sinks of information. It also depicts rapidly sub communities formed from forum participants.