A paper jointly written by Zhou Mingming, associate professor in the University of Macau (UM) Faculty of Education, and Mou Hao, director of DataStory Information and Technology Ltd, a data intelligence centre in Guangzhou, reviewed Chinese public opinions on online education during the pandemic and made practical recommendations for improving online education. The finding was recently published in the international journal Educational Technology Research and Development, the only academic journal in the field of education that focuses entirely on educational technology research and development. It is ranked sixth among international educational technology journals.

The study is based on the social media information and algorithm model provided by DataStory. In the study, Zhou and Mou analysed the changes in public opinion on online education before, during, and after the epidemic, using a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model with sentence pair input for an aspect-based sentiment analysis. In addition to sentiment analysis, content analysis was also conducted using latent dirichlet allocation algorithms to make the exploration of public opinion easier to interpret and more accurate.

Currently serving as the director of the Educational Research Centre and the interim associate dean of the Faculty of Education at UM, Zhou has been conducting research in the fields of educational psychology and educational technology for more than a decade. She analyses educational big data to explore important elements of students’ cognition, metacognition, attitude, and emotion in different learning situations. This research study was supported by UM (File no: MYRG2019-00001-FED). A full version of the paper can be viewed at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11423-022-10080-5

Source: Faculty of Education
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