Identifying the impact of friends on their peers academic performance

Historically data collection in the research pro- cess involves either surveys, interviews or observation, or any combination of all three. Recent developments in the area of formative educational methods have enabled other data collection options. Data sources now available include logs from University Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), E-learning and many other knowledge management systems. Datasets harvested from these sources are less susceptible to the inherent biases intro- duced through the intervention of human interpretation. Data is often structured, complete and traceable. The research in this paper aims to utilise one of these unique digital datasets which represents the footprints created by student activities within a university environment and through Social Network Analysis to identify their influences within peer groups.