Measuring public opinion of education apps

• Published in: Technological forecasting & social change 2023-03, Vol.188, p.122277, Article 122277
• Main Authors: Rondan-Cataluña, F. Javier, Peral-Peral, Begoña, Ramírez-Correa, Patricio E.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Digitalization; Education; Latent Dirichlet Allocation; Sentiment analysis; Twitter
• ISSN: 0040-1625; 1873-5509
• DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2022.122277

This study aims to analyze the opinion of the main agents involved in non-university public education - institutions and citizens - about a particular online educational application used as a way of communication between the aforementioned agents. To do this, we analyze the main topics, emotions and feelings reflected by the agents of the messages published on the social network Twitter to assess the effect of this educational application. We collected 7598 tweets (all of them in Spain between 2018-10-29 and 2021-10-29) using as the word of the query “iPasen” app used in Andalusia (Spanish region) to improve communication between teachers, parents, and students in the public education system. Then, all the tweets were classified between institutions or individuals. The proposed methodology allows us to obtain the main feelings of a very large group of people in a relatively easy way. And it allows managers of public or private educational organizations to track how those feelings evolve. •Methods based on the analysis of messages on SNS can be used to know the evolution of public opinion on different topics•The majority of topics begin the period with negative feelings and end it with a positive valence