A LEARNING ANALYTICS METHODOLOGY FOR STUDENT PROFILING Elvira Lotsari 1 , Vassilios S. Verykios 2 , Chris Panagiotakopoulos 3 , Dimitris Kalles 2 1 Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences, Open University of Cyprus, CYPRUS 2 School of Science and Technology, Hellenic Open University, GREECE 3 Department of Education, University of Patras, GREECE Abstract. On a daily basis, a large amount of data is gathered through the par- ticipation of students in e-learning environments. This wealth of data is an in- valuable asset to researchers as they can utilize it in order to generate conclu- sions and identify hidden patterns and trends by using big data analytics tech- niques. The purpose of this study is a threefold analysis of the data that are re- lated to the participation of students in the online forums of their University. In one hand the content of the messages posted in these fora can be efficiently ana- lyzed by text mining techniques. On the other hand, the network of students in- teracting through a forum can be adequately processed through social network analysis techniques. Still, the combined knowledge attained from both of the aforementioned techniques, can provide educators with practical and valuable information for the evaluation of the learning process, especially in a distance learning environment. The study was conducted by using real data originating from the online forums of the Hellenic Open University (HOU). The analysis of the data has been accomplished by using the R and the Weka tools, in order to analyze the structure and the content of the exchanged messages in these fora as well as to model the interaction of the students in the discussion threads. Keywords: Data Analytics, Social Network Analysis, Text Mining, Educa- tional Data Mining, Learning Analytics 1 INTRODUCTION Nowadays, the online fora have become one of the most popular communication tools in e-learning environments. That communication, especially in distance educa- tion, is among the key factors to benefit learning. For example, an online discussion forum provides motivation for collaboration and group-work for achieving a common goal with personal contribution from every participant. Moreover, an online forum is a significant source of information for educators, and this is why Learning Analytics has become an attractive field among researchers. The online asynchronous discus-