Abstract
E-learning studies are becoming very important today as they provide alternatives and support to all types of teaching and learning programs. The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on educational systems has further increased the significance of e-learning. Accordingly, gaining a full understanding of the general topics and trends in e-learning studies is critical for a deeper comprehension of the field. There are many studies that provide such a picture of the e-learning field, but the limitation is that they do not examine the field as a whole. This study aimed to investigate the emerging trends in the e-learning field by implementing a topic modeling analysis based on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) on 41,925 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2000 and 2019. The analysis revealed 16 topics reflecting emerging trends and developments in the e-learning field. Among these, the topics “MOOC,” “learning assessment,” and “e-learning systems” were found to be key topics in the field, with a consistently high volume. In addition, the topics of “learning algorithms,” “learning factors,” and “adaptive learning” were observed to have the highest overall acceleration, with the first two identified as having a higher acceleration in recent years. Going by these results, it is concluded that the next decade of e-learning studies will focus on learning factors and algorithms, which will possibly create a baseline for more individualized and adaptive mobile platforms. In other words, after a certain maturity level is reached by better understanding the learning process through these identified learning factors and algorithms, the next generation of e-learning systems will be built on individualized and adaptive learning environments. These insights could be useful for e-learning communities to improve their research efforts and their applications in the field accordingly.
Highlights
Today, e-learning has become a very important topic, with applications in every field, as supportive training, lifelong learning modalities, and support tools, for all types of educational systems
A detailed topic modeling analysis is presented to provide an overall picture of e-learning studies
In order to describe the bibliometric characteristics of the e-learning field between 2000 and 2019 (RQ1), the descriptive analysis of the corpus is given below
Summary
E-learning has become a very important topic, with applications in every field, as supportive training, lifelong learning modalities, and support tools, for all types of educational systems. As highlighted by some researchers, since 2000, the number of studies conducted on e-learning has significantly increased (González, 2010) and will likely accelerate in the current pandemic situation By analyzing these studies, one can get a general overview of e-learning studies that can help us understand how the field is evolving and where it is going. Valverde-Berrocoso et al (2020) conducted a systematic review analyzing 248 articles published between 2009 and 2018 and discovered the following: that online students, online teachers, and curriculum-interactive learning environments were the three main nodes of e-learning; that MOOCs were the most researched e-learning modality; that the community of inquiry and the technological acceptance model were the most used theories in the analyzed studies; and, that case studies were the most frequently used methodology. As these systematic reviews require a lot of researcher effort, they are usually conducted with a limited number of articles
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