Social network analysis in student online discussion forums

Current education system in our country lacks use of Technology to promote/aid the student in student-teacher interaction, online fees payment, sharing of academic content, etc. By bringing in such ideas to the education system, quality education can be provided to the mass of student population. In the current scenario of technological advancements, a social network for students would help them gain multitude of knowledge outside their school premises too. This paper discusses about an engine capable of analysing such an online platform to gain multitude of information such as the student´s interaction with theirs peers and teachers, student´s use of the academic content available online, etc. We use popular open-source tools such as R language packages igraph, RMySQL, etc. The analysis is done in a phpBB based forum. The output is visualized as the network graph using JavaScript visualization library called vis.js. All the tools used are open source and free to use tools.