The article presents the results of the analysis of users’ sentiment in social networks, performed using big data tools. The research was aimed at developing the methodology, which enables to analyze the content of social networks, assess students’ attitude to the transition to online learning in conditions of COVID-19 pandemic, identify dynamics and main trends in student satisfaction with the quality of educational process. We explored about 2 million posts and comments posted in university social networks (more than 1000 university public pages) for the period from Sept 2020 to July 2021. Special attention was paid to the problems of communication between students and teachers, strategies to solve them, an emotional reaction. PolyAnalyst software was applied for data precleaning. It has been found that the main problem affecting the quality of education is a change in the mechanisms of interaction between students and teachers. Based on student publications in social networks, we have identified the strategies for adapting students to online learning. We came to a conclusion that teachers’ support of students is crucial in preventing and solving social and academic problems in conditions of online learning. One of the ways to improve interaction between students and teachers, raise students’ involvement is using discussion forums, chats in messengers for academic purposes, and providing teachers’ methodical support.

This research article aims at evaluating the results of the school graduates’ educational strategy transformation with the help of digital footprint data. The analysis of official and unofficial Internet communities of universities in the social network «VKontakte» shows that their active users are school graduates, who thus receive the necessary information about the university. The method presented can become a promising tool to forecast the demand for higher education. The study covers the period from 2019 to 2021, a total of 502 thousand user profiles having been identified, 246 thousand accounts included in the final sample. The results show that during the analyzed period the number of user subscriptions to university communities has decreased in all Russian regions. The orientation towards universities located in other regions has also changed: these were more popular before the pandemic, being subscribed to by the majority of students, whereas after the spread of COVID-19, most of the graduates began to choose universities located in their native region. A significant limitation of this method is that a number of profiles are closed, which logically does not allow to use them in further analysis. The results of the study show, however, high validity and wide opportunities for the use of the digital footprint method when predicting young people’s educational trajectory and planning the enrollment campaign, both on the scale of the university and the whole country.