Privacy-Preserving Distributed Link Predictions Among Peers in Online Classrooms Using Federated Learning

Social interactions among classroom peers, represented as social learning networks (SLNs), play a crucial role in enhancing learning outcomes. While SLN analysis has recently garnered attention, most existing approaches rely on centralized training, where data is aggregated and processed on a local/cloud server with direct access to raw data. However, in real-world educational settings, such direct access across multiple classrooms is often restricted due to privacy concerns. Furthermore, training models on isolated classroom data prevents the identification of common interaction patterns that exist across multiple classrooms, thereby limiting model performance. To address these challenges, we propose one of the first frameworks that integrates Federated Learning (FL), a distributed and collaborative machine learning (ML) paradigm, with SLNs derived from students' interactions in multiple classrooms' online forums to predict future link formations (i.e., interactions) among students. By leveraging FL, our approach enables collaborative model training across multiple classrooms while preserving data privacy, as it eliminates the need for raw data centralization. Recognizing that each classroom may exhibit unique student interaction dynamics, we further employ model personalization techniques to adapt the FL model to individual classroom characteristics. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in capturing both shared and classroom-specific representations of student interactions in SLNs. Additionally, we utilize explainable AI (XAI) techniques to interpret model predictions, identifying key factors that influence link formation across different classrooms. These insights unveil the drivers of social learning interactions within a privacy-preserving, collaborative, and distributed ML framework—an aspect that has not been explored before.