Analysis of People’s Discourse on Universities and Distance Learning on the Internet During the Pandemic caused by the COVID-19

Abstract

The pandemic caused by the new coronavirus (COVID-19) has had a significant impact on education and society as a whole. In this study, we focused on Internet and hashtag searches and analysed people’s Internet discourses on universities and distance learning to learn about the ideal state of university education after the pandemic. According to the results, the search rates for the words ‘distance learning’ and ‘online lessons’ were high after the coronavirus infection. On the other hand, there were no changes in the search trends for the words ‘university student’, ‘student’, and ‘interview class’. Additionally, many of the tweets with the hashtags ‘#distance lesson’ and ‘#online lesson’ seemed to have been sent by parents rather than by students, according to the study of the Twitter data. The analysis of tweets with the hashtag ‘# University student’s daily life is important’ revealed that there were unexpectedly many tweets with moderate emotions. From this, we inferred that calm and appropriate judgement and direction would be desirable without being confused by some radical remarks as the ideal way of university education after the COVID-19 pandemic.