Abstract
The application of Information Technology (IT) in education has opened new scenarios for this ancient process. With rapidly changing field of IT, the adoption of IT in education has been changed drastically. It is quite difficult for researchers to keep pace with changing research trends. An analysis based on the keywords could provide a synopsis on the use of IT in education. The keywords can be extracted and clustered to draw a sketch of trend changes over time. In this paper, we propose two empirical methods based on classic TF/IDF, i.e., overall rating (OR) and dynamic character (DC) of a keyword for in-depth keyword analysis to examine changing trends in research. The method help in disclosing time based changes in research focuses by comparing TF/IDF weights of keywords in different years. A total of 8131 scholarly articles from 12 well recognized journals were used in this analysis. The analysis shows that proposed methods provide sufficient insight into the research trends of application of IT in education in 11 years, i.e., 2007-2017.
Highlights
Despite the controversy over the relationship between technology and education (Bjarnason, 2001), the widespread use of information technology in educational practices has been widely recognized as a promising move to promote the overall development of education (Martí‐Parreño, Méndez‐Ibáñez, & Alonso‐Arroyo, 2016)
In addition to this, using our proposed empirical method of calculating dynamic character bundled with K-means, we show which keywords were most commonly used in research articles in 11 years, i.e., from 2007 to 2017
Result for RQ1 We try to find the answer of our first research question with the help of result1-1 and result1-2
Summary
Despite the controversy over the relationship between technology and education (Bjarnason, 2001), the widespread use of information technology in educational practices has been widely recognized as a promising move to promote the overall development of education (Martí‐Parreño, Méndez‐Ibáñez, & Alonso‐Arroyo, 2016). The use of technology in education is pervasive, yet its contribution to educational research output and dynamics is unclear (Raban & Gordon, 2015). There are a large number of educational research literatures focusing on the application of IT technology in different fields of education, for example: The application of LMS (Learning Management System) in teaching and analysis of its impact on students’ learning(Akram, Fu, Tang, Jiang, & Lin, 2016; Andergassen, Mödritscher, & Neumann, 2014; Jayaprakash, Moody, Lauría, Regan, & Baron, 2014; Kasim & Khalid, 2016; Whitmer, 2013); In particular, Moodle has become a specialized research topic(Sun, Liu, Luo, Wu, & Shi, 2017; Z., R., L., M., & C., 2017), while MOOC is a very hot research topic in recent years(Jordan, 2014; Littlejohn, Hood, Milligan, & Mustain, 2016; Liyanagunawardena, Adams, & Williams, 2013).
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