Don't @ Me

Abstract

With the changes in societies and economies, new formats and packaging of educational products have been emerging as alternatives to the traditional degrees and certificates. Most of these offerings emerge outside higher education institutions and aim to alleviate the gap between the supply of skills and the needs of industries which had a big impact on the educational space. The authors studied approximately four hundred thousand tweets discussing educational offerings. They used a combination of topic modeling and network analysis to group topics into wider themes over the topic network. They also used word embeddings to measure semantic similarity of words related to specific educational packagings and further understand the discussion carried out on Twitter. The results of this study show how public opinion on Twitter discussed formal and non-formal educational offerings in ways that stress economic and professional advancement. Finally, the results from the word embeddings analysis revealed a need for common and clear taxonomy that differentiates between educational formats.