  Blended courses have become the norm in post-secondary education.
Universities use large-scale learning management systems to manage class
content. Instructors deliver readings, lectures, and office hours online;
students use intelligent tutors, web forums, and online submission systems; and
classes communicate via web forums. These online tools allow students to form
new social networks or bring social relationships online. They also allow us to
collect data on students' social relationships. In this paper we report on our
research on community formation in blended courses based on online forum
interactions. We found that it was possible to group students into communities
using standard community detection algorithms via their posts and reply
structure and that the students' grades are significantly correlated with their
closest peers.
