Public Opinions about Online Learning during COVID-19: A Sentiment Analysis Approach

Kaushal Kumar Bhagat, Sanjaya Mishra, Alakh Dixit and Chun-Yen Chang
Additional contact information
Kaushal Kumar Bhagat: Centre for Educational Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, India
Sanjaya Mishra: Commonwealth of Learning, Burnaby, BC V5H 4M2, Canada
Alakh Dixit: Department of Mining Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, India
Chun-Yen Chang: Graduate Institute of Science Education, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei City 116, Taiwan

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 6, 1-12

Abstract: The aim of this study was to analyze public opinion about online learning during the COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) pandemic. A total of 154 articles from online news and blogging websites related to online learning were extracted from Google and DuckDuckGo. The articles were extracted for 45 days, starting from the day the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a worldwide pandemic, 11 March 2020. For this research, we applied the dictionary-based approach of the lexicon-based method to perform sentiment analysis on the articles extracted through web scraping. We calculated the polarity and subjectivity scores of the extracted article using the TextBlob library. The results showed that over 90% of the articles are positive, and the remaining were mildly negative. In general, the blogs were more positive than the newspaper articles; however, the blogs were more opinionated compared to the news articles.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; online learning; sentiment analysis; web scraping (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/6/3346/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/6/3346/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:6:p:3346-:d:519520

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().