Clustering students interactions in eLearning systems for group elicitation

In this work we introduce a novel Learning Analytics approach to identify students’ communities. The introduction of Learning Management Systems in higher education requires the educators to plan their Learning Design (LD) process with the online scenario in mind. We examined the blended learning environment where this process takes place in the Virtual Learning Environment. This allows the educators to track most of the students’ individual activities, but the communications may be excluded from tracking since the students can use side communications channels, such as face-to-face communication, instant messaging and social network platforms. Our approach, using the student-system interactions histories, helps to discover hidden relationships among the students. The elicited information about students’ groupings and social interactions’ evolution over time can be used by educators to adapt and improve their LD process, to find associations between students’ social interactions and their academic performance, as well as to promote team-based learning.