Exploring Technology- and Sensor-Driven Trends in Education: A Natural-Language-Processing-Enhanced Bibliometrics Study

Abstract

Over the last decade, there has been a large amount of research on technology-enhanced learning (TEL), including the exploration of sensor-based technologies. This research area has seen significant contributions from various conferences, including the European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL). In this research, we present a comprehensive analysis that aims to identify and understand the evolving topics in the TEL area and their implications in defining the future of education. To achieve this, we use a novel methodology that combines a text-analytics-driven topic analysis and a social network analysis following an open science approach. We collected a comprehensive corpus of 477 papers from the last decade of the EC-TEL conference (including full and short papers), parsed them automatically, and used the extracted text to find the main topics and collaborative networks across papers. Our analysis focused on the following three main objectives: (1) Discovering the main topics of the conference based on paper keywords and topic modeling using the full text of the manuscripts. (2) Discovering the evolution of said topics over the last ten years of the conference. (3) Discovering how papers and authors from the conference have interacted over the years from a network perspective. Specifically, we used Python and PdfToText library to parse and extract the text and author keywords from the corpus. Moreover, we employed Gensim library Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to discover the primary topics from the last decade. Finally, Gephi and Networkx libraries were used to create co-authorship and citation networks. Our findings provide valuable insights into the latest trends and developments in educational technology, underlining the critical role of sensor-driven technologies in leading innovation and shaping the future of this area.