Opinion Mining on Educational Resources at the Open University of Catalonia

In order to make improvements to teaching, it is vital to know what students think of the way they are taught. With that purpose in mind, exhaustively analyzing the forums associated with the subjects taught at the Universitat Oberta de Cataluya (UOC) would be extremely helpful, as the university's students often post comments on their learning experiences in them. Exploiting the content of such forums is not a simple undertaking. The volume of data involved is very large, and performing the task manually would require a great deal of effort from lecturers. As a first step to solve this problem, we propose a tool to automatically analyze the posts in forums of communities of UOC students and teachers, with a view to systematically mining the opinions they contain. This article defines the architecture of such tool and explains how lexical-semantic and language technology resources can be used to that end. For pilot testing purposes, the tool has been used to identify students' opinions on the UOC's Business Intelligence master's degree course during the last two years. The paper discusses the results of such test. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it demonstrates the feasibility of using natural language parsing techniques to help teachers to make decisions. Secondly, it introduces a simple tool that can be refined and adapted to a virtual environment for the purpose in question.