Community graph elicitation from students’ interactions in virtual learning environments

A novel graph-based approach to elicit students’ communities is introduced in this work. Teaching, in the blended learning environment, is delivered as a mixture of online and offline activities. While the online activities can be tracked and analysed in the Virtual Learning Environment, the offline activities fall out of the educators’ control scope. In this educational setting, communications take place using side channels, such as the instant messaging applications and social network platform. Using our approach, the students’ groupings and social interactions can be elicited by analysing the student-system interactions. The co-occurrence of interactions among the students give information about their social connections. This conveys information useful to elicit the students’ interaction graph and the student communities contained in it. Students’ leader-follower community structure can be elicited starting from the interaction network. This can empower teachers to plan and revise their Learning Designs as well as to identify situations that need teacher’s intervention, e.g. students at risk of failing the exam and/or dropping the studies.