The world is witnessing an unpredictable COVID-19 pandemic that has impacted all levels of online education, shaping future trends. However, this shift was so sudden and drastic that unrevealed puzzles exist regarding the public’s authentic opinion towards online classes, even though three years have passed. Many experts and policymakers have conducted qualitative and quantitative research to explore effective pedagogies, the satisfaction of different stakeholders, and factors influential on learners’ performance. However, scant studies have examined personal opinions and concerns toward online classes hidden behind people’s anonymous posts on social media. This research investigates the sentiments, concerns, and their variance with time regarding online classes by learners and educators on Reddit, which is a dominant social network among them. Data were collected via the official API from identified relevant subreddits and keyword search results across Reddit. Sentiment analysis was applied to reveal their emotions and their changes. Topic modeling was conducted to discover the concerns hidden in the posts. The results revealed the concerns about online classes, such as severe cheating behaviors, and showed doubts about previous strategies to solve disadvantages in online classes. In addition, the results verified the habitual difference and motivations of social media usage between educators and learners.

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Ubiquitous internet access over the past decade has provided opportunities to learn languages online. However, most of the online language learning studies focus on higher education perspectives, while the related learner contribution on the commercial platform has yet to be explored. This study investigates Chinese adult learners' perception of learning English on the online course platform through a qualitative research approach. The semi-structured interview questions comprise five parts: learners' background, learning situation (frequency and time spent), assessment of instructors and teaching materials, preference of delivery model (with traditional classroom compared), and their attainment from the online learning platform. These findings can help platform operators better understand the perception of Chinese amateur adult learners and fill the literature gap to provide educators with insights and references on current research agendas.

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