NETWORK ANALYSIS AND ANALYTICAL TOOLS

Network Analysis is  an area of study that focuses on understanding the relationship and connection between entities such as students, teachers, researchers, learning objects and ideas. It attempts to understand how the entities are connected rather than its attributes. Some of the measurements include the density, centrality, connectivity, interactivity, and degrees. When this is related to learning, it is then referred to as learning analysis.

Read about the validity of learning analytics

There are many open source tools for network analysis. These include:
1. Google Analytics: This is a free tool provided by Google. It is fair easy to use but requires a lot of efforts, and it is the first tool most people start with. Google Visualization provides an API to their chart library allowing for the creation of charts and other visualizations. This interesting features includes visualizing what most people are viewing, knowing what is trending or the most fruitful online campaign.There is an API which adds interactive controls to their charts. These visualizations provide learning feedback systems such as dashboards. It can present the data as heat maps, networking analysis diagrams and tree maps.

2. Social Network Adapting Pedagogical Practice (SNAPP): This is a tool that helps students to easily have access to network visualizations of postings in forums and to evaluate their contributions to the discussions. It also helps faculty and advisers to identify students at risk or isolated on discussion boards/forums. Faculty can also monitor the impact of learning of each student and to monitor the effectiveness of specific learning activity. This tool can be used on Blackboard, Moodle and D2L to monitor forums in real time. 

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3. R: This is an open source statistical tool that has numerous packages for performing all kinds of analysis and modeling. Codes can be written for different situations and there is a library for already existing codes ready to be implemented. It is widely used by researchers. Some of the visualization that can be generated include:

Creating graphs and charts using the  ggplot function. Using the googlevis function to provide an interface between R and the Google Visualization API openNLP  identifies words as nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs 4. Pentaho Integration: This is an open source data integration tool that can be used to acquire a data from a variety of sources. This includes flat files, RSS feeds, relational data bases, etc. It can be used to cleanse data and output data to the same source. 5. Here is a link to more learning analytic tools.     This includes:  Apereo OAE It allows for sharing of knowledge and collaboration among researchers, students and faculty. Bedework It is an open-source calendar system that supports public, personal, and group calendaring.  Sakai It can enhance collaborative teaching, learning and research.  Student Success Plan This is an open source case management software that supports a holistic coaching and counseling model. It can help identify students in need for early intervention.