Meerkat-ED

Meerkat-ED analyzes students' activity in a course offered on computer-supported collaborative learning tools. It prepares and visualizes overall snapshots of participants in the discussion forums, their interactions, and the leaders/peripheral students in the discussions and much more. Please refer to the related publications for in depth description of what Meerkat-ED has to offer.
Also checkout Meerkat, a general network analysis toolbox by the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). Meerkat offers variety of network analysis algorithms for visualization and analyzing the community structure and evolution of information and social networks.

Related Publications

• Reihaneh Rabbany, Samira ElAtia, Mansoureh Takaffoli, and Osmar R. Zaiane, Collaborative Learning of Students in Online Discussion Forums: A Social Network Analysis Perspective", in the Springer edited book Educational Data Mining: Applications and Trends, Springer Series: Studies in Computational Intelligence, 2013    
• Reihaneh Rabbany, Mansoureh Takaffoli, Osmar R. Zaiane, Social Network Analysis and Mining to Support the Assessment of Online Student Participation, ACM SIGKDD Explorations on Educational Data mining, December 2011   
• Reihaneh Rabbany, Mansoureh Takaffoli, Osmar R. Zaiane, Analyzing Participation of Students in Online Courses Using Social Network Analysis Techniques, 4th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM'11), Eindhoven, Netherlands, July 6-8, 2011      

Download

An executable jar file of the toolbox and its required libraries can be downladed here.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you encounter any problems or have any questions.

Getting Started

1. Download and unzip the MeerkatED zip file
2. Execute the MeerkatED.jar either through console or by opening it with Sun Java Runtime
3. Open your course backup file (form moodle v1.5 or v2) from File>Open

On Input Format

In Moodle when you are instructing a course, you can back up the course data as a xml file (Moodle 1.5) or a mbz archive file (Moodle 2). And Meerkat-ED extracts the information about the discussion threads from these files. If the course is not in Moodle, as an alternative, you can format any course data into a simple standard format, save it as a text file(.txt) and open it using MeerkatED to analyze that data. A sample file in that format is included within the MeerkatED package.

Snapshots