Abstract
This paper presents a social learning network analysis of Twitter during the 2020 global shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Research concerning online learning environments is focused on the reproduction of conventional teaching arrangements, whereas social media technologies afford new channels for the dissemination of information and sharing of knowledge and expertise. We examine Twitter feed around the hashtags #onlinelearning and #onlineteaching during the global shutdown to examine the spontaneous development of online learning communities. We find relatively small and ephemeral communities on the two topics. Most users make spontaneous contributions to the discussion but do not maintain a presence in the Twitter discourse. Optimizing the social learning network, we find many potential efficiencies to be gained through more proactive efforts to connect knowledge seekers and knowledge disseminators. Considerations and prospects for supporting online informal social learning networks are discussed.
Highlights
The current pandemic has altered social behaviors on a massive scale
The results are presented in the following order: social network analysis followed by sentiment analysis
This is reflected in the number of conversational groups which drop from 623 to 409 and 183 to 59
Summary
The current pandemic has altered social behaviors on a massive scale. With the global COVID-19 pandemic sparked by the emergence of a novel coronavirus in late 2019 [1], large portions of the global population have seen their livelihoods drastically shifted online. Parents scrambled online to find educational activities as they suddenly found schools and the public realm closed indefinitely and had to find ways to occupy their children during the pandemic. The present context offers an opportunity to explore the formation of online communities over the course of the global shutdown which saw many states enforce public measures such as social distancing to reduce the spread of the virus. To search out threads about online teaching and learning, you might search for #onlinelearning or #onlineteaching. We mined Twitter posts to explore how the Twitter conversational communities around online teaching and learning evolved over the course of the global shutdown. How did the online conversational communities evolve on Twitter during the global shutdown due to the COVID-2019 pandemic?
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