Of Collaborative Learning Team: An Approach for Emergent Leadership Roles Identification by Using Social Network Analysis

The ability to better understand role performing during the learning process of a collaborative learning team is very crucial, in order to effectively support online students. Leadership roles which have the most influence in directing the team should be carefully recognized. Identifying the emergent team leaders is challenging because these roles are normally distributed and shifted among team members over time. In this paper, a new approach for the leadership roles identification is, thus proposed. The collaboration patterns are examined with different points of social network views to discover the network locations of the leaders. The proposed leadership index is a combination of degree of centrality, closeness and betweenness. The experiment and the simulation results indicate that the proposed index is promising.