ABSTRACT
Introduction: The development of COVID-19 vaccines has been a great relief in many countries that have been affected by the pandemic. As a result, many governments have made significant efforts to purchase and administer vaccines to their populations. However, accommodating such vaccines is typically confronted with people's reluctance and fear. Like any other important event, COVID-19 vaccines have attracted people's discussions on social media and impacted their opinions about vaccination. Objective: The goal of this study is twofold: First, it conducts a sentiment analysis around COVID-19 vaccines by automatically analyzing Arabic users' tweets. This analysis has been spread over time to better capture the changes in vaccine perceptions. This will provide us with some insights into the most popular and accepted vaccine(s) in the Arab countries, as well as the reasons behind people's reluctance to take the vaccine. Second, it develops models to detect any vaccine-related tweets, to help with gathering all information related to people's perception of the virus, and potentially detecting vaccine-related tweets that are not necessarily tagged with the virus's main hashtags. Methods: Arabic Tweets were collected by the authors, starting from January 1st, 2021, until April 20th, 2021. We deployed various Natural Language Processing (NLP) to distill our selected tweets. The curated dataset included in the analysis consisted of 1,098,376 unique tweets. To achieve the first goal, we designed state-of-the-art sentiment analysis techniques to extract knowledge related to the degree of acceptance of all existing vaccines and what are the main obstacles preventing the wide audience from accepting them. To achieve the second goal, we tackle the detection of vaccine-related tweets as a binary classification problem, where various Machine Learning (ML) models were designed to identify such tweets regardless of whether they use the vaccine hashtags or not. Results: Generally, we found that the highest positive sentiments were registered for Pfizer-BioNTech, followed by Sinopharm-BIBP and Oxford-AstraZeneca. In addition, we found that 38% of the overall tweets showed negative sentiment, and only 12% had a positive sentiment. It is important to note that the majority of the sentiments vary between neutral and negative, showing the lack of conviction of the importance of vaccination among the large majority of tweeters. This paper extracts the top concerns raised by the tweets and advocates for taking them into account when advertising for the vaccination. Regarding the identification of vaccine-related tweets, the Logistic Regression model scored the highest accuracy of 0.82. Our findings are concluded with implications for public health authorities and the scholarly community to take into account to improve the vaccine's acceptance.
ABSTRACT
With the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, educational systems worldwide were abruptly affected and hampered, causing nearly total suspension of all in-person activities in schools, colleges, and universities. Government officials prohibited the physical gatherings in educational institutions to reduce the spread of the virus. Therefore, educational institutions have aggressively shifted to alternative learning methods and strategies such as online-based platforms—to seemingly avoid the disruption of education. However, the switch from the face-to-face setting to an entirely online setting introduced a series of challenges, especially for the deaf or hard-of-hearing students. Various recent studies have revealed the underlying infrastructure used by academic institutions may not be suitable for students with hearing impairments. The goal of this study is to perform a literature review of these studies and extract the pressing challenges that deaf and hard-of-hearing students have been facing since their transition to the online setting. We conducted a systematic literature review of 34 articles that were carefully collected, retrieved, and rigorously categorized from various scholarly databases. The articles, included in this study, focused primarily on highlighting high-demanding issues that deaf students experienced in higher education during the pandemic. This study contributes to the research literature by providing a detailed analysis of technological challenges hindering the learning experience of deaf students. Furthermore, the study extracts takeaways and proposed solutions, from the literature, for researchers, education specialists, and higher education authorities to adopt. This work calls for investigating broader and yet more effective teaching and learning strategies for deaf and hard-of-hearing students so that they can benefit from a better online learning experience.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about many challenges to course delivery methods, which have forced institutions to rapidly change and adopt innovative approaches to provide remote instruction as effectively as possible. Creating and preparing content that ensures the success of all students, including those who are deaf and hard-of-hearing has certainly been an all-around challenge. This study aims to investigate the e-learning experiences of deaf students, focusing on the college of the Technical and Vocational Training Corporation (TVTC) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Particularly, we study the challenges and concerns faced by deaf students during the sudden shift to online learning. We used a mixed-methods approach by conducting a survey as well as interviews to obtain the information we needed. Our study delivers several important findings. Our results report problems with internet access, inadequate support, inaccessibility of content from learning systems, among other issues. Considering our findings, we argue that institutions should consider a procedure to create more accessible technology that is adaptable during the pandemic to serve individuals with diverse needs.