Challenges and Opportunities of Using Twitter Data in Educational Discourse Research: A Methodological Reflection from the Malaysian ODL Context

This paper offers a methodological reflection on the use of Twitter (now X) as a data source for analysing public discourse surrounding Open and Distance Learning (ODL) in Malaysian higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic and endemic phases. Drawing on a corpus of over 30,000 tweets collected between March 2020 and December 2022, of which 3,000 were purposively sampled for qualitative analysis, the paper integrates Discursive News Value Analysis (DNVA) and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) to examine linguistic and thematic patterns. Drawing from an ongoing doctoral research project, it discusses the advantages of using Twitter for capturing spontaneous, affective expressions of student experiences, while critically examining key challenges including linguistic hybridity, data cleaning, contextual ambiguity, and ethical considerations. The study demonstrates how Twitter-based data can provide a rich discursive lens into students’ reception of education policies and institutional responses during crisis conditions. It also highlights the methodological potential of corpus-assisted and discourse-based frameworks, such as Discursive News Value Analysis (DNVA) and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), for navigating and interpreting large-scale social media data. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research, emphasising ethical sensitivity, tool selection, and the value of methodological triangulation. These insights affirm Twitter’s ongoing relevance as a powerful medium for post-pandemic educational research and for understanding the lived realities of digitally mediated learning.