Abstract
E-learning has been continuously present in current educational discourse, thanks to technological advances, learning methodologies and public or organizational policies, among other factors. However, despite its boom and dominance in various subject areas, this thematic does not yet exist in the world system of publications. Therefore, works in this thematic end up being published under related categories, particularly in education or computer science, thus fragmenting and make invisible the existing knowledge. This work is based on the hypothesis that the scientific communication of e-learning has a sufficient degree of cohesion to be considered as a thematic category in itself. From a bibliometric approach, its scientific production was analyzed, obtaining the bibliographic data of SCOPUS and SCImago Journal & Country Rank, selecting its main descriptors and generating visualizations through VOSViewer with the mapping overlay technique, to represent its set and proximity. As a result, it was determined that a set of 219 publications show a high bibliometric interrelation among its articles and these are presented mainly in the social sciences and transversally between computer science and health professions. This set serves as a channel of scientific communication and structure of knowledge on the thematic and can therefore be considered as the basis for establishing the “e-learning” thematic category in the world system of scientific publications, contributing to the consolidation of the discipline, to its access and development by researchers.
Highlights
E-learning, short for “electronic learning”, arises as a name for the advances that have been made in education through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and in particular the internet
The search results are refined by source type, by primary literature, the language (English), the time period for the analysis is selected, preferably without erratic behaviors in the annual production rate and a representative sample of the documents is selected on which to perform the bibliometric analysis based on the co-occurrence of keywords, with the aim of determining primary descriptors that are mainly present in articles, their relationships and relevance by means of the technique of Visualization of Similarities (VoS) (Waltman et al, 2010)
This study shows that there is a set of publications, derived from 64 descriptors related to the e-learning thematic, whose bibliometric analysis places them primarily in social sciences and secondly in the areas of computer science and health professions
Summary
E-learning, short for “electronic learning”, arises as a name for the advances that have been made in education through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and in particular the internet. The interest turn towards the educational, on the one hand concerning learning (Stockley, 2006) and on the other hand to the understanding of this new modality as an evolution of the distance modality (Tick, 2006). Over time, it has been given a highly revolutionary character, granting it the capacity to transform education through the production, participation and consumption of content in various formats. Chiang determines on his work that e-learning research is expanding significantly (Chiang, Kuo, & Yang, 2010)
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