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Online education is the by-product of the development of science and technology. Online learning is a kind of distance education with the features of detachment between teachers and students (Keegan, 1996). The instructors’ teaching and learning materials of online learning are displayed by means of the Internet (Watson et al., 2004). Online courses are not confined to time and space (Lee & Choi, 2011). Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, education from primary school to universities in the world has undergone a tremendous transformation. In many countries, teaching was forced to change from the traditional face-to-face class into the online milieu. Due to the rampant spread of the coronavirus and its variants, there is an urgent need of online education to substitute traditional education provisionally as a response to the lockdown policy (Chung et al., 2022).
The research pertinent to this field has been augmenting in an enormous amount. The COVID-19 pandemic has vastly affected educational mechanisms and spawned a plethora of research concerning online education (Yu, 2021b). It is indispensable to coma through these researches systematically in a technical way. So far, however, few writers have paid attention to drawing on any systematic and visual research into reviewing the relevant literature by searching in the database of the Web of Science, which is the focus of this paper. This study puts emphasis both on online teaching and online learning rather than only one aspect. When the author searched the relevant keywords in the database, the author found that there are only three results concerning online education in the COVID-19 using the VOSviewer and CiteSpace software (Figure 1). This paper aims to present a bibliographic review using a bibliometric method based on the VOSviewer (Van Eck & Waltman, 2010, 2014) and CiteSpace (Chen, 2006) software to visualize the research regarding online education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Clustering techniques are quite significant to the bibliometric study (Van Eck & Waltman, 2017). The bibliometric approach can render an objective and comprehensive analysis of the primary academic papers by means of providing the analysis of co-occurrence, co-authorship, citation, etc. Citation analyses of the relevant literature are employed in academic and scientific research recently (Alvarez-Peregrina et al., 2021). The bibliometric instruments offer researchers visual clustering/mapping to better grasp the research focus and tendency, which provide significant references and implications for educational researchers and practitioners in the post-COVID-19 era as well.
Figure 1. Results of similar research