Sentiment Analysis for Distance Education Course Materials: A Machine Learning Approach

Nowadays many companies and institutions are interested in learning what do people think and want. Many studies are conducted to answer these questions. That’s why, emotions of people are significant in terms of instructional design. However, processing and analysis of many people's ideas and emotions is a challenging task. That is where the 'sentiment analysis' through machine learning techniques steps in. Recently a fast digitalization process is witnessed. Anadolu university, that serves 1 million distant students, is trying to find its place in this digital era. A learning management system (LMS) that distant students of the Open Education Faculty (Açıköğretim Fakültesi) is developed at the Anadolu University. Interaction with students is the clear advantage of LMS's when compared to the hard copy materials. Book, audio book (mp3), video and interactive tests are examples of these materials. 6059 feedbacks for those online materials was scaled using the triple Likert method and using machine learning techniques sentiment analysis was performed in this study. 0.775 correctness ratio was achieved via the Logistic regression algorithm. The research concludes that machine learning techniques can be used to better understand learners and how they feel.