Covid-19 effects on distance education in higher education: A comparison with bibliometric analysis before Covid-19 pandemic and the Covid-19 pandemic periods

Authors : Murat TOPAL, Aslihan İSTANBULLU, Sirin KUCUK-AVCI

Pages : 864-879

Doi:10.31681/jetol.1016705

View : 15 | Download : 8

Publication Date : 2021-12-31

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :The Covid-19 pandemic, which emerged in the last months of 2019, spread rapidly and has affected the whole world. The pandemic also affected higher education significantly, and face-to-face education in higher education institutions were suspended. Most universities have changed the teaching method from traditional to online education. Thus, more and more researchers focused on COVID-19 and distance education in higher education. The aim of the research was to examine the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on higher education studies in the field of distance education. For this reason, the changes in distance education research in the pre-pandemic and the pandemic period were analyzed in terms of some performance variables. Two different meta-data sets, consisting of 1322 articles for the pre-COVID-19 period and 2103 for the COVID-19 period, obtained by querying the Web of Science database, were used for analysis. Vosviewer software were used for bibliometric analysis, while Harzing’s Publish or Perish software was used for h-index calculation. Publications from the two different periods were compared according to researcherinsert ignore into journalissuearticles values(s);, publication, journal, institution, and country criteria using citation analysis. The citation analysis showed that the most cited researchers of the pre-pandemic period were A.Bozkurt, B. Rienties, and D. U. Bolliger, while the most cited researchers of the post-pandemic period were C. Herodotou, J. C. Bonk and M.Y. Doo. Computer & Education ranked among the most-cited journal in the pre-pandemic period, while in the post-pandemic period, the most cited journal was Education and Information Technologies The most cited studies in the pre-pandemic period were conducted by researchers working at King Saud University and the University of South Africa, while in the post-pandemic period Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Indiana University were in the leading position. The results clearly show that Covid-19 has given a new direction to distance education.
Keywords : Higher Education, Distance Education, COVID 19, Pandemic