E-learning and sentiment analysis: a case study

Abstract

E-Learning is becoming one of the most effective training approaches. In particular, the blended learning is considered a useful methodology for supporting and understanding students and their learning issues. Thanks to e-Learning platforms and their collaborative tools, students can interact with other students and share doubts on certain topics. However, teachers often remain outside of this process and do not understand the learning problems that are in their classrooms. A solution for ensuring the privacy of communication among students could be the adoption of a Sentiment Analysis methodology for the detection of the classroom mood during the learning process. In this paper, we investigate the adoption of a probabilistic approach based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) as Sentiment Grabber. The proposed approach can detect the mood of students on the various topics and teacher can better tune his/her teaching approach. The proposed method has been tested in real cases with effective and satisfactory results.