Detecting communities using social network analysis in online learning environments: Systematic literature review

Uncovering community structure has made a significant advancement in explaining, analyzing, and forecasting behaviors and dynamics of networks related to different fields in sociology, criminology, biology, medicine, communication, economics, and academia. Detecting and clustering communities is a powerful step toward identifying the structural properties and the behavioral patterns in social networks. Recently, online learning has been progressively adopted by a lot of educational practices which raise many questions about assessing the learners' engagement, collaboration, and behaviors in the new emerging learning communities. This systematic literature review aims to assess the use of community detection techniques in analyzing the network's structure in online learning environments. It provides a comprehensive overview of the existing research that adopted those techniques with identifying the educational objectives behind their application as well as suggesting possible future research directions. Our analysis covered 65 studies that found in the literature and applied different community discovery techniques on various types of online learning environments to analyze their users' interactions patterns. Our review revealed the potential of this field in improving educational practices and decisions and in utilizing the massive amount of data generated from interacting with those environments. Finally, we highlighted the need to include automated community discovery techniques in online learning environments to facilitate and enhance their use as well as we stressed on the urge for further advance research to uncover a lot of hidden opportunities.