Multidimensional Data Analysis to Assess Interactions in an E-learning Community

The quality of the cooperation and collaboration between members is one of the crucial factors in the development of an online learning community. In this paper we focus on the analysis of the quantity and type of interaction and cooperation between students in the asynchronous discussion forum of a virtual classroom. In order to describe both the qualitative and quantitative measures of the interrelationships in the net structure we propose to adopt the theoretical framework of Multidimensional Analysis of Textual Data in connection with the theoretical framework of Social Network Analysis. The tools made available by Correspondence Analysis of the lexical table are used to derive a semantic reference space in which to locate the nodes and arcs of the communication network. The underlying interrelation structure and the evolution of the conversational themes are shown by visualizing the students that share the same vocabulary and patterns of frequent lemmas used in the forum. The role of each student in the communication process is highlighted by suitable statistical indicators defined in the framework of Social Network Analysis