Measurement of Online Education System in Pakistan during COVID-19: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

The outbreak of the pandemic COVID-19 wobbled the entire educational system of the country analogous to the rest of the world. It leads to an abrupt eruption of online education. All the stakeholders are struggling to coup up with this sudden transformation. The higher education system of Pakistan is not an exception and is striving to survive against this global outburst. In the present research, the social media language used by various participants is explored through conducting multiple corpora and computational methodologies coupled with comparative analysis of survey results. The study focuses on the keyness, collocations, and visualization of the self-constructed corpus of electronic media. Multiple machine learning techniques (Sketch Engine, and Wordsmith version 8) have been used to retrieve the data and compile it into the corpus. The word ‘online education has been observed regarding concordances, collocates, and n-garam. The common 4-gram phrase used throughout the corpus is ‘the quality of education’. Moreover, survey results regarding students’ online class experiences conducted from 8-11 June 2020 bya public sector university have been used as a reference for comparison. It shows that the survey results validate the text analysis outcomes. A total of 7198 students have responded to this online survey. Whereas a total of 37,796 words-based corpora based on online education, has been built up by the authors for this study. The hybrid methodological model of the current research encompasses comprehensive topographies of online learning and its influence on the community. It is valuable to contemplate the present research as seed work for exploring and quantifying the new dynamics of onlineeducation