Abstract
The concept of personal learning environments (PLEs) is relatively new and is continuously developing. Over the past decade, there has been a significant upsurge in the number of PLEs-related research. Nevertheless, there is a lack of recent systematic reviews and trend analysis covering many PLEs studies; to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, the current systematic review is significant and indispensable in reviewing journal articles that discussed PLEs between 2000 and 2020. We searched Web of Science, Scopus, Sciences Direct, JSTOR, Springer, Google Scholar, and IEEE Xplore for studies published in English without limit in location or time to retrieve accurate results. Trend graphics for the extracted themes were also analyzed using descriptive statistics in Excel. According to the defined inclusion criteria, one hundred forty-eight articles were selected for the analysis. This study reveals that literature on PLEs has progressed from 2000 to 2020; the majority of PLEs-related articles were published between 2011 and 2020, with the year 2013 having the highest number of published articles (17 articles), followed by 16 papers published in both years 2014 and 2017. We found that the published PLEs research originated from 46 countries; 26 (17.6%) were from Spain. The majority of the authors had education, computer science, information technology and engineering backgrounds. This review also showed that numerous platforms had been used in PLEs research, with Web 2.0 the most commonly used platform. We noted that the most common objectives of the included articles were PLEs custom system development, analysis of the PLEs, description of experiments, investigations, development of factor models, framework development, and examination. The most common theoretical perspectives in the published articles were self-regulated learning, self-directed learning, and constructivism. The current systematic review and trend analysis can become a guidance platform for researchers, educators, policymakers or even journal publishers for future research in PLEs research.
Highlights
Personal learning (PL) is identified as lifelong learning, which deals with getting information differently [1]
There is a lack of recent systematic reviews and trend analysis covering many Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) studies to the best of our knowledge
There is a lack of recent systematic reviews and trend analysis covering a large number of PLEs studies
Summary
Personal learning (PL) is identified as lifelong learning, which deals with getting information differently [1]. According to Schwartz (2016), learners should be provided with the flexibility to enhance their various skills to analyze data critically [2] In this manner, the notion of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) was initially studied by Olivier and Liber [3]. According to Taraghi and Ebner (2011) and Alalwan et al (2019), in an environment where learners can integrate the distributed resources, applications and tools in a single platform can be tailored to individual learners to offer an acceptable circumstance for developing their specific needs in a study environment that allows people to interact within collaborative and distributed environments [5], [6] In this situation, PLEs are an instructive approach that enables students to employ social media to enhance self-regulated learning in both official and non-official pedagogical contexts [7], [8]
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