A Large-Scale Dataset of Twitter Chatter about Online Learning during the Current COVID-19 Omicron Wave

Please cite the following paper when using this dataset:

N. Thakur, “A Large-Scale Dataset of Twitter Chatter about Online Learning during the Current COVID-19 Omicron Wave,” Journal of Data, vol. 7, no. 8, p. 109, Aug. 2022, doi: 10.3390/data7080109

Abstract

The COVID-19 Omicron variant, reported to be the most immune evasive variant of COVID-19, is resulting in a surge of COVID-19 cases globally. This has caused schools, colleges, and universities in different parts of the world to transition to online learning. As a result, social media platforms such as Twitter are seeing an increase in conversations, centered around information seeking and sharing, related to online learning. Mining such conversations, such as Tweets, to develop a dataset can serve as a data resource for interdisciplinary research related to the analysis of interest, views, opinions, perspectives, attitudes, and feedback towards online learning during the current surge of COVID-19 cases caused by the Omicron variant. Therefore this work presents a large-scale public Twitter dataset of conversations about online learning since the first detected case of the COVID-19 Omicron variant in November 2021. The dataset is compliant with the privacy policy, developer agreement, and guidelines for content redistribution of Twitter and the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) principles for scientific data management.

Data Description

The dataset comprises a total of 52,984 Tweet IDs (that correspond to the same number of Tweets) about online learning that were posted on Twitter from 9th November 2021 to 13th July 2022. The earliest date was selected as 9th November 2021, as the Omicron variant was detected for the first time in a sample that was collected on this date. 13th July 2022 was the most recent date as per the time of data collection and publication of this dataset.

The dataset consists of 9 .txt files. An overview of these dataset files along with the number of Tweet IDs and the date range of the associated tweets is as follows. 

• Filename: TweetIDs_November_2021.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 1283, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: November 1, 2021 to November 30, 2021)
• Filename: TweetIDs_December_2021.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 10545, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: December 1, 2021 to December 31, 2021)
• Filename: TweetIDs_January_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 23078, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: January 1, 2022 to January 31, 2022)
• Filename: TweetIDs_February_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 4751, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: February 1, 2022 to February 28, 2022)
• Filename: TweetIDs_March_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 3434, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: March 1, 2022 to March 31, 2022)
• Filename: TweetIDs_April_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 3355, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: April 1, 2022 to April 30, 2022)
• Filename: TweetIDs_May_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 3120, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: May 1, 2022 to May 31, 2022)
• Filename: TweetIDs_June_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 2361, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: June 1, 2022 to June 30, 2022)
• Filename: TweetIDs_July_2022.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 1057, Date Range of the associated Tweet IDs: July 1, 2022 to July 13, 2022)

The dataset contains only Tweet IDs in compliance with the terms and conditions mentioned in the privacy policy, developer agreement, and guidelines for content redistribution of Twitter. The Tweet IDs need to be hydrated to be used. For hydrating this dataset the Hydrator application (link to download and a step-by-step tutorial on how to use Hydrator) may be used.

The list of all the synonyms or terms that were used for the dataset development is as follows:

COVID-19: Omicron, COVID, COVID19, coronavirus, coronaviruspandemic, COVID-19, corona, coronaoutbreak, omicron variant, SARS CoV-2, corona virus

online learning: online education, online learning, remote education, remote learning, e-learning, elearning, distance learning, distance education, virtual learning, virtual education, online teaching, remote teaching, virtual teaching, online class, online classes, remote class, remote classes, distance class, distance classes, virtual class, virtual classes, online course, online courses, remote course, remote courses, distance course, distance courses, virtual course, virtual courses, online school, virtual school, remote school, online college, online university, virtual college, virtual university, remote college, remote university, online lecture, virtual lecture, remote lecture, online lectures, virtual lectures, remote lectures