Trend of Distance Education in the last three Decades

In the literature, there weren’t any up-to-date reviews of Distance Education (DE) documents. This reveals that there was a research gap for a detailed review of distance education articles to find an up-to-date trend of distance education. The purpose of this study is to examine research and trends in DE, from the 160 selected documents, during 1972 and 2008 June. A Review of 160 distance education documents is done to investigate documents related to DE that are indexed by the Web of Science, Scopus, EBSCO host and Science Direct. “Distance Learning”, “Online Learning”, “Online Education”, “Distance Education”, “DE” were the keyword used for searching documents, and total 9866 documents analyzed that were judged to be relevant to the field of DE. The principal documents related to DE published in the publications during 1972–2008 June; were article. “English” was the most frequently used language. The most frequent publishers of documents related to DE were ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, Turkish Online Journal of DE, and Proceedings Frontiers in Education Conference. The majority of the publications were in the subject area Social Sciences. Distance Education, Students and Humans were the keywords in the first three ranks. The trend line is an increasing DE trend in the number starting from the year 1972. It was recommended that, a combination of content analysis and citation analysis should be used in future research studies.