Abstract:

This study involved the development of learning projects to familiarize higher education students the extraction of information from online user-generated content, to produce managerial insights. Students developed projects to extract and analyze samples of relevant citizen reviews, available in web and social media sites, and employed content analysis techniques to categorize the data according to service quality attributes.

The assessment of service quality is a critical source of information for organizations as well as for public administration. However, the collection of information from the users of public services can face important limitations as individuals’ often feel overwhelmed with the multiple demands for feedback, and offer resistance to answering extensive and rich questionnaires. The good news is that, in recent years, there has been a proliferation of user-generated content largely with the dissemination of online technologies. These new media have expanded enormously the scope for data collection about citizens’ experiences. However and despite the proliferation of online content produced by citizens, there is very limited research exploring the content and the sentiments expressed by individuals’ in such formats. Likewise, there is still a paucity of approaches and methods to develop competencies in higher education students and future professionals to deal with this increasingly important type of data for management and decision making. This gap in is particularly critical for students from non-technological areas.

This study provides a timely contribution for the development of competencies for making sense of online content, by means of developing learning projects rooted in up-to-date empirical data, therefore allowing for important gains in students’ motivation, engagement and learning. The projects developed with the students builds on a sample of citizen reviews for the Portuguese municipalities, available online to conduct a content analysis in order to identify and characterize the attributes of quality in public services that are latent in the sentiments of users. The data collection was an iterative process, involving the selections of further examples of customer reviews during the content analysis path. The content analysis allowed for the association of citizens sentiments with the scope of attributes typically associated with public service quality, including tangible service elements, the responsiveness of local services and empathy of public service providers. These results are discussed towards socio-demographic and digital literacy characteristics of the various municipalities addressed, paving the way for a debate on digital literacy and citizen online participation towards public services.

The paper offers a description of the project format and methodology, namely the protocol for the conduction, and orchestration, of the projects and the steps involved in the extraction, analysis, classification and sense-making of the data, discussing the results while offering a detailed description of the teaching and learning experience that can be replicated in other contexts.

Higher Education institutions need to incorporate this challenge and advance in the qualification of future professionals to handle such data. This study proposes a contribution in this direction.

Keywords:

Online reviews, digital skills, higher education, information extraction, competencies.