DECODING VIEWS AND SENTIMENTS OF PROGRAM HEADS TOWARDS THE SUPERVISION OF INSTRUCTION DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
The purpose of this study was to decode the hidden views and sentiments from the collated written responses of Eastern Samar State University’s Program Heads regarding supervision of instructions amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. This study utilized Exploratory Sequential Mixed Method to explore and understand the perspective or sentiments of Eastern Samar State University program heads towards supervision of instruction in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected/collated from the participants indirectly using an interview questionnaire containing an open-ended question. The same were processed and analyzed using an open-source machine learning software called Orange toolbox (Demsar et al., 2013) wherein pre-processing, sentiment analysis and topic modelling built-in tools were utilized. The results showed that the most prominent words generated by the machine learning tool from the text file of responses are the words pandemic, performance, program, learning, difficult, supervision, instruction, internet, faculty, online students, teaching, delivery confusing, challenging, poor and connectivity. The dominant sentiment associated thereof lean towards negative polarity which implicate negative sentiments. Hidden topics were automatically generated by the machine which allowed the researchers to come up with the following related themes: “Impact of pandemic in the supervision of instruction of faculty and learning of students”, “Challenges in the delivery of instruction and supervision due to poor internet connectivity”, and “Strategic role of online modalities and connectivity in supervision and delivery of instruction”. There are limited researches navigating in text mining and sentiment analysis with the use of Orange toolbox particularly those that deals with supervision of instruction in a Philippine State University. There are related studies using machine learning software, but nothing like this study directed towards a specific gap in specific locale. KEYWORDS: Pandemic, Latent Semantic Indexing, Orange Toolbox, Sentiment Analysis, Thematic Analysis.