Analysis of the Lingering Effects of COVID-19 on Distance Education

Abstract

Education has been severely impacted by the spread of the COVID-19 virus. In order to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus and maintain education in the current climate, governments have compelled the public to adopt online platforms. Consequently, this decision has affected numerous lives in various ways. To investigate the impact of COVID-19 on students’ education, we amassed a dataset consisting of 10,000 tweets. The motivations of the study are; (i) to analyze the positive, negative, and neutral effects of COVID-19 on education; (ii) to analyze the opinions of stakeholders in their tweets about the transition from formal education to e-learning; (iii) to analyze people’s feelings and reactions to these changes; and (iv) to analyze the effects of different training methods on different groups. We constructed emotion recognition models utilizing shallow and deep techniques, including Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long-short Term Memory (LSTM), Random Forest (RF), Naive Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Logical Regression (LR). RF algorithms with a bag-of-words model outperformed with over 80% accuracy in recognizing emotions.