Sentiment Analysis to Evaluate Teaching Performance

1. Motivation And Background

(Hazelkorn, 2013) claims that university rankings mechanisms in use are subject to several drawbacks such as, for example, measurement accuracy, measuring the university as a whole institution, and the way data is being collected for measuring specific indicators at universities. For instance, only the average quality of a university is measured, while individual subjects are not considered in the computation. And different compilers have adopted different methods to produce these rankings (Berbegal-Mirabent & Ribeiro-Soriano, 2015). Moreover, indicators such as university reputation have a higher influence value than some others (Olcay & Bulu, 2016), especially on social media (Bunzel, 2007; Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy & Silvestre, 2011). In this sense it appears unsurprising that Higher Education institutions turned to social media strategies to target and attract new students (Constantinides & Zinck Stagno, 2012). Furthermore, relevant educational factors such as quality of teaching or the quality of student experience are taken into account but only marginally (Hazelkorn, 2013), even if students use social media daily and, as such, they are well acquainted with their use (Westerman, Daniel & Bowman, 2016; Siamagka & Christodoulides, 2016). Not surprisingly, therefore, there haven’t been new attempts of constructing rankings mechanisms that seek to incorporate student satisfaction (Vidal, 2016) and content analysis of news media coverage (Friedrichsmeier & Marcinkowski, 2016). For instance, some findings indicated that instructors, from any discipline or culture, could deliver courses through social media platforms thanks to different features provided by social media tools, that encourage, for their part, students’ participation (Kilis, Gülbahar, & Rapp, 2016). Other inquiries show how numbers of instructors are turning to social networking sites to communicate with students, since instructor credibility seems to increase when students are engaged with his social posting with respect to the only scholar posting activity of the teacher (Johnson, 2011).