Temas y sentimientos predominantes en Twitter sobre educación en tiempos del covid-19

Abstract

Emergency remote education started around mid-March 2020 because of the measures taken by governments all around the world to reduce the propagation of COVID-19. With their own resources and often without the required digital skills, teachers and students continued with educational processes from their homes. In this scenario, we set out to analyze Twitter publications related to education in times of COVID-19 to identify the trend in the polarity of feelings, the topics of interest and the potentially most influential users. We imported 1, 399, 272 tweets in Spanish, published by 198, 440 users along a period of 100 days. To analyze the data, we employed social media analysis, text mining, and sentiment analysis. R language was fundamental in the tweet import and analysis. Results showed that 70% of the tweets were positive and 20% negative; 81.0% were retweets; 10.3% were bookmarked; 20% included emojis and, 5.9% included multimedia resources. The use of words such as health, classes and children predominated; 33.5% of tweets included hashtags referring to prevention and biosecurity measures, and recognition of teachers; 20.4% of the tweets included web domains, where mass media predominated. The potentially most influential users had affiliation to mass media.