Reviewing the research on distance education and e-learning

Abstract

This paper will provide insight into the current emphasis of research on distance education and e-learning. The review is organized by three intersecting activities. First, we informally collected and reviewed approximately 300 peer-reviewed journals for articles published on distance education and instruction and technology broadly defined [30]. Second, we read and reviewed the numerous meta-analyses of distance education, multimedia, e-learning, and collaborative computing published over the last fifteen years [1--2, 4--6, 17, 25--27, 31, 33, 35]. Third, we performed our own meta-analysis of the abstracts of articles published in 10 peer-reviewed journals on distance learning and e-learning. Our goal in all these activities was to generate a list of significant topics or themes contained in publications about distance education and e-learning, in part to demonstrate the lack of consistent terminology.