ABSTRACT
Text analytics is emerging as regular practice in the Institutional Research Department at Fanshawe College. This project describes an application outside of regular use with student evaluation data. There was an emerging strategic need to provide timely and accurate responses to prospective student questions. Web forms were enabled on program pages to collect all these inquiries. The analytic project occurred in two stages: Part 1 (2017) applied in vivo coding to the first 1000 web submissions; and Part 2 (2018) replicated the process but used text analytics software to analyse 34,314 web inquiries. Themes for both approaches were used to develop, then refine, frequently asked questions to guide personalised responses to prospective students. Findings identified an unexpectedly high use of web forms by international students and common informational challenges for adult learners navigating the website, indicating the need for user experience design improvements focused on program information. Human resource implications for text analytics were significant, reducing analyst time on the project as compared to traditional qualitative coding approaches. A key outcome was the development of AskFanshawe, an automated online response service based on frequently asked questions, as the groundwork for chatbot implementation.
