Comparison and Transition of Research Focus on Application of IT in Education

Yuyao Li, Aftab Akram, Yong Tang

OAI: oai:igi-global.com:288545 • DOI: 10.4018/IJICTE.288545

The application of Information Technology (IT) in education has opened new scenarios for this ancient process. With rapidly changing field of IT, the adoption of IT in education has been changed drastically. It is quite difficult for researchers to keep pace with changing research trends. An analysis based on the keywords could provide a synopsis on the use of IT in education. The keywords can be extracted and clustered to draw a sketch of trend changes over time. In this paper, we propose two empirical methods based on classic TF/IDF, i.e., overall rating (OR) and dynamic character (DC) of a keyword for in-depth keyword analysis to examine changing trends in research. The method help in disclosing time based changes in research focuses by comparing TF/IDF weights of keywords in different years. A total of 8131 scholarly articles from 12 well recognized journals were used in this analysis. The analysis shows that proposed methods provide sufficient insight into the research trends of application of IT in education in 11 years, i.e., 2007-2017.