Students' Interactions and Course Performance: Impacts of Online and Offline Networks

摘要

This paper takes a social network approach to understand students' interactions and their course performance. Drawing from media richness theory and media synchronicity theory, we distinguish students' online and offline communication networks to theorize the relationship between network structure and students' course performance. Particularly, we examine a specific property of the network structure, i.e., closeness centrality, defined as the extent to which a student is close to other students in the network and thus relates to the ease of access an individual has to others. We explain the interdependence of online and offline networks and theorize about how it is associated with students' course performance. A study of 52 students in the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.) supported our theory.