E-catalog        

Библиогр.: 14 назв.

Educational globalization makes leading universities search for new ways of recruitment aimed at
gifted smart youth not only from the same but from other countries as well. Since the university
resources are limited from the point of view of coverage and attraction of the entrants, there is a need
for a focused informational influence on a precise audience with specific features. This audience
consists of high school students who show some interest in certain academic subjects and have soft
skills for a successful study and an academic career. At the same time, the “natural habitat” of the
modern schoolchildren is social networks. These social networks are the source of open data basing
on which one can define potential entrants with a set of the required features according to the
university entrant model. These data analysis and interpretation let a university to find promising
entrants in any region or even a country and establish a direct communication with them via the social
networks without any mediators.
The current paper covers the experience in collecting and analyzing the data about the users of social
networks (the Russian social network VKontakte is taken as an example) to define the potential
entrants. The authors provide a solution to the tasks related to building an entrant model, exporting
data from the social networks using API, processing natural language, defining the entrants’ soft skills
and educational interest via the analysis of the data taken from their profile, their walls, their friendship
connections.