ُSomaye Rajabzade; Mahmoud Ekrami; Faramarz Soheili; Hamid Maleki
Abstract
Co-citation analysis is one of the methods used in scientific studies and drawing the scientific structure of various domains. The purpose of the present research is to map the structure of the field of distance learning based on computational analysis and its method is content analysis by the use of ...
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Co-citation analysis is one of the methods used in scientific studies and drawing the scientific structure of various domains. The purpose of the present research is to map the structure of the field of distance learning based on computational analysis and its method is content analysis by the use of Co-citation analysis. The research community includes the documents that have been indexed in the field of distance learning studies in the World Wide Web Database from 1985 to 2016 and reaches 31607 records. For analyzing the data, the software "UCInet" and "Bibe Excel" have been used. In this research, the symmetric matrix and cluster analysis method were used to analyze the data.
The structure of the distance education field is based on the citation analysis composed of eight clusters as follows: "Machine learning", "E-learning infrastructure", "Mobile learning patterns", "Educational technology and artificial intelligence", "Miscellaneous", "Learning theories and understanding models", "Education in cyberspace" and "Distance Education methods". According to formed clusters, the main and most common topic in research in this field is "E-learning".
The results of clusters analysis and strategic diagram showed that emerging concepts of distance education field are as follows: artificial intelligence in education, educational engineering, intelligent learning environment, educational design, motivational management, retraining, taxonomy, computational intelligence, multiple Media, information sharing and Models of concepts understanding. Research policymakers should push the research priorities of this field toward these concepts.
