Sentiment analysis of students’ feedback in MOOCs: A systematic literature review

Abstract

In recent years, sentiment analysis (SA) has gained popularity among researchers in various domains, including the education domain. Particularly, sentiment analysis can be applied to review the course comments in massive open online courses (MOOCs), which could enable instructors to easily evaluate their courses. This article is a systematic literature review on the use of sentiment analysis for evaluating students’ feedback in MOOCs, exploring works published between January 1, 2015, and March 4, 2021. To the best of our knowledge, this systematic review is the first of its kind. We have applied a stepwise PRISMA framework to guide our search process, by searching for studies in six electronic research databases (ACM, IEEE, ScienceDirect, Springer, Scopus, and Web of Science). Our review identified 40 relevant articles out of 440 that were initially found at the first stage. From the reviewed literature, we found that the research has revolved around six areas: MOOC content evaluation, feedback contradiction detection, SA effectiveness, SA through social network posts, understanding course performance and dropouts, and MOOC design model evaluation. In the end, some recommendations are provided and areas for future research directions are identified.