We just published a new article in Educational Technology Research and Development: “Forum posts, communication patterns, and relational structures: A multi-level view of discussions in online courses” . This article relies on the approach we previously published using the formalism of Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to model the formation of relational networks from data of online forums used in university courses. Utilizing these models in the context of bipartite networks before projecting them into a weighted network allows for the creation of null models that assume different mechanisms of forum use. The statistical comparison of these null model projections with the actual network enabled us to assess the significance of global characteristics such as density, the number of communities, or clustering, as well as filter links to obtain sparse relational structures whose structural properties can be compared and grouped by similarity.
Marc Santolini 