Sentiment analysis of the ICT4Rural education teacher professional development course

Abstract

This paper reports on an attempt to gauge the experiences of teachers participating in a teacher professional development course through sentiment analysis. The course formed part of a large scale implementation aimed at changing teachers’ classroom practice to reflect a 21st century teaching and learning engagement. The course was purposely designed for a gameful educational user experience to address the design challenge of motivating the participants through a yearlong intervention. Although the actual design and implementation of the course is beyond the scope of this paper, we present results that indicate that the course was experienced mostly relevant and positive. This novel way of gauging the sentiment and hedonistic attributes of a course, holds much promise for similar applications.