Social Learning Analytics (SLA) can be used to help students visualize what is happening in their courses. For example, an SLA dashboard can represent the graph of interactions with other course participants. An SLA tool named CanvasNet does this, for example. But does it help? This article tries to dig into this question by studying the impact of three types of graph visualization: the social network, the topic network, and the cognitive network (that measures the depth of the students' engagement with the content). The results? Well, it depends on which students we're talking about. For example, "when peripheral students were provided with social and cognitive information, they developed a better self-awareness of their learning processes and thus their engagement increased." But as usual this is a small study with limited applicability, so take the results as preliminary only.
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