Artificial intelligence in distance education and distance learning: Bibliometric and topic modeling analysis.

The use of artificial intelligence methods in the classroom has become increasingly common. The advancements in artificial intelligence have had far-reaching consequences and have pushed for new approaches to education. The full integration of different artificial intelligence techniques into education has shown that distance education and learning are open and flexible. The application of artificial intelligence in the field of education has emerged as a prominent topic of study in recent years, making an exploratory review of the subject matter necessary. This study examines data extracted from Scopus database which yields 918 research articles on artificial intelligence in distance education and distance learning published up to 2022. The aim of this study is to identify trends and themes of the research area. The frequency of words used in the titles and abstracts of the articles has been identified using bibliometric analysis, which has also been used to determine publication trends. Yearly trends of publication and most cited articles during the publication period have been identified. This study used the topic modeling method to find coherent research topics that are the focus of the articles and were used to find research themes. There are ten distinct themes that have been uncovered using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation technique. This study makes a contribution toward the goal of providing a clear view of the existing themes or topics of research related to Artificial Intelligence in the field of Distance Education and Distance Learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]