Online learning in management education amid the pandemic: A bibliometric and content analysis

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022) had triggered a global crisis which led to the suspension of colleges and universities. Management educators had digitally transformed their teaching to new modalities with digital technologies and adapted to technological solutions. The management students had experienced different online modes of learning and adjusted their methods to the new reality of content delivery. This study aims to discuss opportunities and challenges for management education and facilitate further investigation into the emerging trends on online learning by analyzing the characteristics of management education research and examining the most frequent research themes from 2020 to 2022. A bibliometric analysis is used to review 920 papers retrieved from the Scopus database for exploring key research themes of management education and online learning. The findings revealed that the publications are concentrated in developed countries while European countries had accounted for the largest proportion of the listed publications. Five sub themes are identified for receiving the most scholarly attention, such as pedagogy, technology, assessment methods, learning outcomes or skills, and challenges. After all, the bibliometric and thematic findings identified pivotal theoretical contributions, including fields of online or blended learning and management education converge, to extend the existing online learning theories.