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Analyzing two decades of immersive technology research in education: Trends, clusters, and future directions

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Abstract

This study aims to analyze the research outputs of immersive technology in the field of education for the past two decades. To this end, we retrieved 2665 articles that contained 75674 valid references from the Scopus database for the period between 2001–2021. Several structural and temporal metrics were used to find out the emerging topics proposed by the literature of immersive technology in the field of education. Results recorded 869 clusters entailing 2561 nodes and 3372 links. The major clusters identified in our results were related to virtual reality, augmented reality, and virtual worlds. We found that immersion research was grounded on a robust theoretical framework such as constructivism, experiential learning, and cognitive load theory. We found diversified venues of publication in which the immersion literature appeared in 741 peer-reviewed journals. Our results indicate that seven educational technology journals were the most highly co-cited journals where Computers and Education and British Journal of Educational Technology were the most influential journals in terms of quantity and quality of the published articles, recording the highest h-index. Tips and suggestions for future research projects were also highlighted.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to the Deanship of Scientific Research at Najran University for funding this work under the Distinguished Research Funding Program grant code NU/DRP/SEHRC/12/16.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, College of Languages and Translation, Najran University, Najran, 66251, Saudi Arabia

    Mohammed Ali Mohsen

  2. Curriculum and Instruction Department, College of Education, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, P.O. Box 1982, Dammam, Saudi Arabia

    Tahani Salman Alangari

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  1. Mohammed Ali Mohsen
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Correspondence to Mohammed Ali Mohsen.

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Mohsen, M.A., Alangari, T.S. Analyzing two decades of immersive technology research in education: Trends, clusters, and future directions. Educ Inf Technol 29, 3571–3587 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-11968-2

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