Trends and Patterns in Distance Education (2014–2019): A Synthesis of Scholarly Publications and a Visualization of the Intellectual Landscape
Bibliographic record
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.057 | 0.105 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".