The Digital Voice of Students: Analysing Emerging Themes in a Corpus of University Reviews

Abstract

For higher educational institutions, reviews on Google Maps offer a free and easily accessible platform for students to express their needs and voice their concerns voluntarily. Such a platform can be valuable for capturing a wide range of academic and non-academic aspects that may not be manifested via traditional feedback instruments such as surveys. Accordingly, this study explores the themes that emerge in a corpus of online reviews collected from Google Maps of 29 Saudi public universities while also highlighting how such reviews form a public discourse shaped by the medium itself. To this end, this research employed an NLP advanced technique, namely BERT, to categorise the reviews into themes based on their semantic similarity. Then, a thematic analysis was conducted to reveal six main recurrent themes in the corpus: location and accessibility, facilities and infrastructure, academic quality and teaching, student support services, religious sentiment and gratitude, and community and social environment. The findings indicate that while Google Maps reviews capture a number of cultural and social aspects of university life, they inherently foreground physical (e.g., amenities) and logistical (e.g., location) dimensions. The paper also demonstrates how online reviews provide students with a platform to raise issues related to both micro-level (e.g., specific courses, amenities) and macro-level concerns (e.g., inclusivity), hence their potential value in contributing to the evaluative discourse on higher education institutions. These results suggest the need for a systematic engagement with online feedback platforms to promote continuous institutional improvement and cultivate an inclusive, student-centred educational environment.