SNAPP — Real-Time Social-Network Visualisation for Spotting Isolated Students

SNAPP (Social Networks Adapting Pedagogical Practice) is a free, open-source browser scriptlet developed by Shane Dawson, Aneesha Bakharia and Elizabeth Heathcote at the University of Wollongong, Australia, first presented at the ACM Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) conference in 2011.

To let instructors see in real time which students are central to a discussion-forum conversation and which are isolated or peripheral, by turning Moodle and Blackboard forum activity into social-network diagrams.

SNAPP scrapes discussion-forum pages from Moodle and Blackboard and renders them as social-network graphs. Because the underlying network-analysis method is fully visible rather than a black-box model, teachers could inspect exactly why a student was flagged, using the diagrams for both real-time outreach and, more commonly, post-course reflection on their own moderation style.

Published documentation of SNAPP's impact is mostly descriptive and qualitative - case studies of how staff used it and what they noticed - rather than a controlled study measuring learning-outcome gains.

SNAPP was distributed free of charge and worked across several major learning-management systems, letting it spread beyond Wollongong, but by the mid-2010s independent maintenance had slowed as forum-scraping approaches became harder to sustain against changing LMS interfaces.