The Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Distance Education in Higher Education: A Bibliometric Analysis Study

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the COVID-19 effect on distance education in higher education in the pre-COVID-19 pandemic (January to November 2019) and postCOVID-19 pandemic periods (December 2019 and January to December 2020). Two different meta-data sets, consisting of 580 articles for the pre-COVID-19 period and 746 for the post-COVID-19 period, obtained by querying the Web of Science database, were used for analysis. SciMAT and Vosviewer software were used for bibliometric analysis. Publications from the two different periods were compared according to keywords, words from abstracts, based on the criteria using co-occurrence and co-word analysis. The results of the keyword co-occurrence analysis show that the keywords e-learning and online learning were used more in the post-COVID- 19 period compared to the pre-pandemic period. In the pre-pandemic period, the thematic trend of academic studies largely aligned with students and satisfaction. However, in the post-pandemic period, the research trend was mostly toward such themes as video lectures and web 2.0 technologies. The research results show that the impact of COVID-19 was reflected in the research published in the post-pandemic period, with the interest in e-learning and online learning increasing in higher education, alongside a trend towards investigating the delivery of instruction rather than conducting student-centered studies.