Enhancing online learning: sentiment analysis and collaborative filtering from Twitter social network for personalized recommendations

Abstract

Online learning presents a major challenge for learners, namely the diversification of courses and information overload. In response to this issue, recommender systems are widely used. Nowadays, social networks have become a global platform where individuals share a multitude of information. For instance, Twitter is a social network where users exchange messages and interact with various communities. These interactions on social networks have created a new dimension in the field of online learning. In this article, we propose a novel approach that combines sentiment analysis of learners’ reviews on social networks with collaborative filtering methods to provide more personalized and relevant course recommendations. To achieve this, we explored different models to analyze the sentiments of tweets related to online courses. Additionally, we used collaborative filtering based on k-nearest neighbors (KNN). Our results demonstrate that integrating sentiment analysis provides more relevant recommendations. This has also been shown based on the calculation of root mean square error (RMSE) compared to a traditional approach. In this study, we demonstrated that by leveraging this information from social networks like Twitter, online learning platforms can enhance the effectiveness of their course recommendations, tailoring them to each individual learner’s needs.