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, and first presented at the ACM Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) conference in 2011.

The tool scrapes discussion-forum pages from Moodle and Blackboard and renders them as social-network graphs, letting an instructor see in real time which students are central to a discussion and which are isolated or peripheral. Because the underlying network-analysis method is fully visible rather than a black-box model, teachers can inspect exactly why a student is flagged, which supported both real-time outreach and, more commonly in practice, post-course reflection: instructors used the diagrams to review whether their own moderation style (for example, replying mainly to individual students rather than encouraging peer-to-peer discussion) was shaping the network patterns they saw.

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

Read the full analysis: https://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/SNAPP