Abstract:

Given the abundance of educational resources on YouTube, this social media platform has become an ideal space to which students resort to enhance their learning in a variety of subjects. Despite the positive impact that YouTube educational materials have on students’ learning experience, teachers do not usually have easy access to the comments that students post on this video sharing website. Our objective in this paper is, therefore, to propose a sentiment-based approach that can analyze students’ feedback. To this end, textual data was retrieved from YouTube, cleaned and then processed using sentiment analysis. Results of the study demonstrated that rather than being limited to the thumb up/down strategy that users use to rate a YouTube educational video, the proposed approach can enable teachers to gain valuable insights into how their students are learning. In fact, instructors can get not only the opinions or sentiments of students on the video, but also information on issues that they master and on the particular areas that they need to work on. Making beneficial use of these insights will undoubtedly improve teaching strategies and, thus, enhance students’ learning experience.

Keywords:

Education, sentiment analysis, YouTube, student feedback.