Definition of educational interests of schoolchildren

Ulyana S. Zacharova, Artem V. Feshenko. Definition of educational interests of schoolchildren on the basis of the analysis of user data of «Vkontakte»

National Research Tomsk State University, Tomsk, Russia

Abstract: Social media are an important element in the communication policy of the modern university; they allow delivering information to the target audience without intermediaries, providing wide territorial coverage at low cost. But the existing methods of advertising targeting in social networks do not allow universities to determine the individual educational needs and interests of prospective students and to consult them on the choice of educational programme. For this reason, during recruiting campaigns universities create universal social media communities meant for advertising of all educational programs at once. Using this approach, it is difficult to segment the target audience by interests and focus their attention on study programmes correlating with their personal interests. Modern methods of user data analyzing allow universities to conduct a recruiting campaign more efficiently. This article shares the experience that Tomsk State University made with different methods of data analysis to identify in social networks prospective students with pronounced interests in a particular subject area. Methods of content analysis, statistics, surveys, and data mining were employed by a research group.

Keywords: data analysis, social networks, educational interests, entrants.

http://dh.tsu.ru/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/vkontakte.pdf