Technology-enhanced higher education: Text mining and bibliometrics

Objectives: Research on technology-enhanced higher education (TEHE) has been active and influential in educational technology. The study had three objectives: (1) to recognize the tendencies in the field and the contributing countries/regions/institutions, (2) to visualize scientific collaborations, and (3) to reveal important research topics, their developmental tendencies, correlations, and distributions across contributing countries/regions/institutions. Methods: We collected 609 papers in relation to TEHE from 2004 to 2022 and analyzed them using text mining and bibliometric methods. Specifically, we focused on determining article trends, identifying contributing institutions/countries/regions, visualizing scientific collaborations through social network analysis, and revealing the important topics and their conceptual evolutions over time using topic models, Mann-Kendall trend test, hierarchical clustering, and Sankey visualization. Results: Regarding the first objective, TEHE articles have grown consistently and will continue to expand. This growth was due to the contributions of Spanish universities and institutions from other countries/regions such as the USA, the UK, Australia, Germany, China, and Turkey. Regarding the second objective, the exploration of regional and institutional collaborations through social networks revealed that geographically adjacent institutions tended to foster close collaborations, particularly among those sharing similar research interests. Nevertheless, more cross-regional collaborations are needed to advance TEHE research. Regarding the third objective, the analysis of topics highlighted research hotspots and emerging themes such as Massive Online Open Courses, AI and big data in education, Gamification and engagement, Learning effectiveness and strategies, Social networks and discussion forums, COVID-19 and online learning, and Plagiarism detection and learning analytics. Conclusions: This bibliometric study comprehensively analyzed the research landscape of TEHE research regarding contributors, collaborations, and research topics, and offers a glimpse into what the future may hold. It can be used as a guide for contributors to the field to identify the current research hotspots and emerging themes.