Social Network Analysis of European Project Consortia to Reveal Impact of Technology-Enhanced Learning Projects

The European Commission (EC) has spent hundreds of millions of euros on collaborative Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) projects in recent years. Consequently the EC is interested in the impact generated by those projects. Spawning sustained collaboration ties can be interpreted as one aspect of project impact. In this paper we present a novel way of analyzing this latent impact of TEL projects by applying social network analysis on the projects' collaboration structures. Our analysis includes TEL projects funded under FP6, FP7 and eContentplus, and identifies central projects and strong, sustained organizational collaboration ties.