Evaluating Students Online Discussion Performance by Using Social Network Analysis

Online discussion forum is becoming an important part in college education nowadays. To evaluate student's online discussion performance is essential since more and more professors have included online participation as a part of their class grade. In this paper, we use social network analysis methods to help professors in evaluating individual student's online discussion performance. By applying degree centrality (out-Degree and in-Degree) and density metrics, we can identify students who have been actively involved in the discussion board and find out those who need to be encouraged to participate in. Also, SNA software tools are used to visualize students' online discussion participation networks and help to identify these active nodes. In addition, Page Rank algorithm has been applied to the same data to rank the prestige nodes in this social network and the results are compared with degree centrality metric one. The experimental data of students' online discussion threads are collected from one undergraduate course MIS at our University and results show that students who actively participate in online discussion have good academic performances.