Educational Data Mining: Sentiment analysis in a university domain during the pandemic

The new normality caused by the COVID 19 health emergency forced governments to adopt mandatory isolation rules, the measures modified social interaction in almost all scenarios. In the educational field, educational establishments in general closed their facilities and adopted technological tools to replace the physical classroom, thus inaugurating a period of emergency remote education (Hodges et al., 2020) (Portillo, S., Castellanos, L., Reynoso, O., & Gavotto, O., 2020) (Castaneda and Vargas, 2021). The present investigation analyzes the student perception about the implementation of emergency remote education in the Social Communication Career of the Central University of Ecuador in the academic period 2020 -2020, for which an opinion poll was applied to students. The qualitative instrument collected the opinion, and the corpus was processed in a Python bookstore. In general, a positive assessment of the new educational reality was evidenced, the use of platforms and social networks was highlighted, as well as innovative educational practices in: master classes, experimentation, tutorials and evaluations; Among the negative aspects, the low teacher/student interaction, the lack of didactics in digital environments, and the deepening of the technological gap were questioned.