  With an expansive and ubiquitously available gold mine of educational data,
Massive Open Online courses (MOOCs) have become the an important foci of
learning analytics research. In this paper, we investigate potential reasons as
to why are these digitalized learning repositories being plagued with huge
attrition rates. We analyze an ongoing online course offered in Coursera using
a social network perspective, with an objective to identify students who are
actively participating in course discussions and those who are potentially at a
risk of dropping off. We additionally perform extensive forum analysis to
visualize student's posting patterns longitudinally. Our results provide
insights that can assist educational designers in establishing a pedagogical
basis for decision-making while designing MOOCs. We infer prominent
characteristics about the participation patterns of distinct groups of students
in the networked learning community, and effectively discover important
discussion threads. These methods can, despite the otherwise prohibitive number
of students involved, allow an instructor to leverage forum behavior to
identify opportunities for support.
