Team formation for collaborative learning with social network consideration based on edX's online discussion board

Collaborative Learning (CL) along with the changing of the teaching environment, the way how students interact has also changed. The rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) lets the teaching environment turn into online teaching. Deriving from MOOCs, Small Private Online Course (SPOC) incorporates the concept of Blended Learning (BL), which combines the advantage of MOOCs and face-to-face teaching. In this context, implies an enormous amount of consideration of group division factors and information volume when teachers organize groups. In the face of an unprecedented workload size, organizing groups manually is extremely time consuming and difficult for teachers. In this paper, we make use of the advantages of the conditions of SPOC, retrieving the social network of students on the online discussion board, then the heterogeneous division of groups based on academic results is the supplementary to do grouping. In addition, this paper makes use of edX, a representative platform of MOOCs, and develops the group division modules based on the format of the online discussion boards of the platform. Comparing with the way of grouping by students themselves in this context, the method which brought out by this paper do a better job in learning performance in spite of the satisfactions is worse.