Abstract
The field of distance education (DE) is dynamic and constantly evolving; it reflects and adapts according to changes in socio-cultural, demographic, political, and technological domains. Thus, there is a need to understand past and present activities in the field, in order to better inform future research. The main purpose of this study was to examine DE research through data mining and analytics approaches, using social network analysis (SNA) and text mining to conduct a bibliographic analysis. The findings highlighted three main strands of DE research: (a) issues related to open education; (b) the design, support, and quality assurance of online DE; and (c) the implementation and use of educational technology, media, and digital tools. SNA of the bibliometric data identified pivotal theoretical contributions, including that the fields of distance education and educational technology converge. The article concludes with recommendations for future research directions.
Highlights
The field of distance education (DE) has long been dedicated to providing flexible ways for a wide diversity of learners to access knowledge and learning opportunities
In order to provide a first rough description of the focal points in DE research, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) analysis was conducted based on titles and abstracts of the articles in the research corpus. t-SNE is an unsupervised “nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique that aims to preserve the local structure of data”, used for exploring and visualizing high dimensional data
Our findings demonstrate that research in the period from 2014 to 2019 published in leading DE journals focused on three broad areas:
Summary
The field of distance education (DE) has long been dedicated to providing flexible ways for a wide diversity of learners to access knowledge and learning opportunities. DE has adapted and developed DE-specific curricula, educational strategies, and learning models that meet the needs of learners, by taking advantage of increased capacity and affordances of prevalent technologies. Years of experience in the theory and practice of DE have provided a clear pathway for the transformation of higher education due to changing characteristics of teaching, learning, and educational institutions. DE proved its value during the interruption of education due to the COVID-19 pandemic; further, the field of DE has been a significant change agent in the digital transformation of higher education
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