Revealing and Interpreting Crowd Stories in Online Social Environments

The underlying patterns in large scale social media datasets can reveal valuable information for interaction designers and researchers, both as part of realtime interactive systems and for post-hoc analysis. Music Circle is a social media platform aimed at researching the role of community feedback in online learning environments. A large dataset was collected when the platform was used as part of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). We developed a novel analysis technique for observing global patterns in the behaviour of students. The technique employs network theory techniques to view student activity as an interconnected complex system, and observes the temporal dynamics of network metrics to create timelines which are clustered into groups using unsupervised learning methods. This approach highlighted global trends and groups of outliers that needed further attention or intervention.