Analysis of Online Education Reviews of Universities Using NLP Techniques and Statistical Methods

Abstract

In the long-running battle against COVID-19, it is worth further discussing how well online education is accepted by users as a new type of education method which is popularized suddenly. The launch of a large-scale online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic gave us the opportunity to investigate the opinions and emotions of online teaching users. This paper employs NLP techniques and statistical methods to process 93754 comments collected from the three online teaching platforms designated by the Ministry of Education for universities. This study aims to gain a better understanding of the changing characteristics of students’ opinions and emotions regarding online teaching, as well as to learn what students required and how the platforms functioned during the epidemic period. The findings revealed that (1) users of online teaching platforms were mostly concerned about whether the teaching resources provided by the platforms were rich and of high quality all along. The main influencing factors affecting online teaching experiences during the implementation of large-scale online teaching are hardware device deficiencies such as server congestion and network lag. (2) The majority of users expressed positive attitude towards online education which played a positive role during the outbreak. (3) The epidemic had a significant impact on the emotions of online teaching users. In short, the research themes showed that online teaching users are always concerned with the richness and quality of the platform’s resources. Furthermore, the most important issues for users during the period of large-scale online teaching are whether the network infrastructure is efficient and smooth, as well as the platform’s function perfection. The popularity of online teaching helped to solidify the online teaching space and improve its social image. This study provides a point of reference for the development and improvement of online education and compensates for a lack of relevant studies.