The New Trends and Applications in E-Learning Environments and E-Technologies

Methods

In this chapter, a systematic review of the literature on e-Learning and its associated emerging technologies is carried out, exploring mainly the Scopus and Web of Science databases, and investigating various works carried out from 2000 to 2022, with the objective of establishing the e-Technologies and e-Learning that are used to support the requirements of teachers, as well as the new trends and applications of these technologies and their effectiveness in the training and education process of higher education students, taking into consideration the factors that may influence their adoption and successful use. As several review studies suggest (Hsu et al., 2012), it is essential to review data sources for high quality articles. To this end, articles were selected from different databases for this study, as these contain the most reputable collections of journal articles, as well as printed documents from various publishers and theses from different universities. The results of the consultations (“e-Learning”, “adaptive e-learning”, “adaptive learning” or “personalized learning”, “e-Technologies”, “New technologies in learnig”, “ New trends in e-Learning”, “Extended Reality (XR)”, “Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) in e-Learning”) carried out to the articles in the databases were normally high. The publication period was set at approximately two decades (i.e., 2020 to 2022) to ensure that there was adequate data to observe research trends, and the type of publication was set as “article” as recommended by other study reviews (Lin & Lan, 2015). Since ‘‘adaptive learning’’ is also a term in the area of machine learning in computer science, the authors established the category as ‘‘education/educational research’’ in addition to those that existed, with a total of 86 articles found in the consultation results. These articles were truly related to e-learning and associated emerging technologies, which were read and analyzed carefully using the following criteria for inclusion. Each article should be relevant to the understanding of e-learning, adaptive learning supported by technology, VR, AR and (XR) in e-learning. To be specific, each article should be related to the use of e-learning and e-technologies systems to support to teaching a learning functions and activities, as well as e-Technologies, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Extended Reality in e-Learning. Adopting this criteria, irrelevant articles were filtered out, leaving 65 relevant articles for the e-Learning, the VR and AR and ER (XR) in e-Learning, as well as the e-Technologies in e-Learning. The remaining 23 articles formed the final data set for the analysis, to which 10 conference papers, 1 Reports (evaluation, research, technical), working papers and policy briefs, 1 graduate dissertations, and 11 books were added. These results are shown in Table 1. To ensure that the review process is rigorous and valid, the guidelines suggested by Webster and Watson (2002), and Okoli and Schabram (2012) have been followed.