Knowledge Atlas of Online Education Research in China Based on

Visual Analysis

Xiao Xiao

and Guanghua Yang

School of business administration, Wuhan Business University, Wuhan 430056, China

Keywords: Online Education, Citespace, Visualized Analysis, Knowledge Map.

Abstract: By analyzing the situation of my country's online education research, we summarize the research hotspots and

future trends, with the purpose of providing reference and reference for my country's online education

innovation research. Combined with Citespace, this paper draws a scientific knowledge map of my country's

online education research based on the online education related literature in the CSSCI database. It is found

that my country's online education research is significantly affected by national policies and the new crown

epidemic, the number of published articles shows a steady growth trend, and the research group is scattered

Therefore, scholars need to strengthen cooperation with institutions, further scientific and objective in-depth

practice, and combine qualitative and quantitative research methods to promote a more comprehensive

development of online education research.

1 INTRODUCTION

Compared with Western countries, China's online

education started relatively late. Technically

restricted by Internet technology; conceptually

shackled by traditional classrooms, although various

platforms and companies are trying their best to

explore and move forward, the industry is developing

slowly. In October 2019, 11 departments including

the Ministry of Education jointly issued guidelines,

proposing to promote the healthy development of

online education. The new crown epidemic in 2020

has caused an unprecedented interruption of

education services. The Ministry of Education called

for "suspending classes without stopping school".

The "China Education Modernization 2035" issued

by the State Council clearly proposed to "accelerate

the educational reform in the information age". Based

on this, this paper uses Citespace software to analyze

the literature on the theme of "online education" in

my country in recent years, and presents the research

progress through visual means, in order to provide

decision-making reference for practical work.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9577-9517

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6150-2977

2 RESARCH METHODS AND

DATA SOURCES

2.1 Research Methods

2.1.1 Scientific Collaboration Analysis

The research hotspots and frontiers in the field of

"online education" are investigated through

bibliometrics, and the evolution characteristics of

research in this field are revealed in an objective,

quantitative, direct and visual way through data

mining and graph analysis, which can effectively

avoid traditional literature research methods.

Questions that are biased towards inductive reasoning

and are too subjective.

This study uses Citespace's visual analysis of

online education research, and uses a combination of

quantitative and qualitative methods to cluster the

knowledge base and keyword co-occurrence of the

literature, and then analyze the research context and

trends of online education.

Xiao, X. and Yang, G.

Knowledge Atlas of Online Education Research in China Based on Visual Analysis.

DOI: 10.5220/0011913100003613

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on New Media Development and Modernized Education (NMDME 2022), pages 421-428

ISBN: 978-989-758-630-9

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

421

2.1.2 Price's Law

The square root of the total number of scientists,

produces 50 percent of all scientific papers. If the

number of papers published by the most productive

scientist is set as nmax, and the total number of papers

published by scientists is denoted as x(1,nmax),

price's law can be expressed as follows:

(1/2) × (1 ,𝑛𝑚𝑎𝑥) =𝑥(𝑚 ,𝑛𝑚𝑎𝑥)

= 𝑥(1,𝑚)

(1)

Where, M is such a number assumed by Price, that

is, the total number of papers published by scientists

whose individual number of papers is greater than m

is exactly equal to half of the total number of papers,

and the meaning of X (m, nmax) in the equation

exactly represents this half of papers.

Based on lowe's law and mathematical

conclusion, price deduced that m≈0.749(nmax 1/2).

2.1.3 The K-Mean Clustering Algorithm

K-means is a clustering algorithm based on the

partition of sample sets. K-means clustering divides

the sample set into K subsets to form K classes, and

divides N samples into K classes. The distance from

the center of each sample to its class is the smallest,

and each sample belongs to only one class. For large

data sets, k-means clustering is relatively scalable and

effective.

Given the data sample X, n objects are included

X={X

, X

, ...., X

},Where each object has

properties of m dimensions. The goal of the K-means

algorithm is to cluster n objects into the specified k

class cluster based on the similarity between the

objects, and each object belongs to and only to one

class cluster with the smallest distance from the

center of the class cluster. For K-means, the k

clustering centers need to be initialized first{C

, C

, ...., C

}, 1<k≤n ,Then, by calculating the

Euclidean distance from each object to each cluster

center, as follows:

dis(Xi,Cj)=



(𝑋



− 𝐶



)







(2)

In the above formula the X

represents the i-th

(1≤i≤n) object, the C

represents the j-th(1≤j≤k)

cluster center, the X

represents the t-th attribute of

the t-th (1≤i≤m) object, The C

represents the t-th

attribute of the j-th cluster center. Comparing each

object from distance to each cluster center in turn,

assigning objects to the class cluster from the nearest

cluster center, yields k class clusters{S

, S

, ...,

The K-means algorithm defines the prototype of

the cluster with the center. The cluster center is the

mean of all the objects in the cluster in each

dimension. The calculation formula is as follows:

𝐶



∑

𝑋





∈



𝑆



(3)

In the formula, C

represents the center of the l-

th(1≤i≤k) cluster,│S

│ represents the number of

objects in the l-th class cluster, X

represents the i-th

object in the l-th class cluster, 1≤i≤│S

│.

Therefore, the visual analysis of online education

research in this paper mainly focuses on the

clustering of knowledge base and keyword co-

occurrence of the literature, and then analyzes the

research context and trend of online education.

2.2 Data Sources

The data of this article comes from the Chinese Social

Science Citation Index (CSSCI). Searching "online

education" in the "all fields" method yields 314

search results. After manual screening, reviews,

reviews, reports, etc. were removed, and finally 286

papers (1998-2022) with reference value were

obtained as research objects, and the acquisition time

was July 12, 2022. By systematically sorting and

summarizing 286 literatures, it shows the history of

online education research in my country.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

3.1 Analysis of Publication Time

An analysis of the time distribution of the number of

publications is helpful to understand the degree of

attention paid to online education research.

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Figure 1: Time distribution of online education research in China.

As shown in Figure 1, the number of published

papers on online education research in my country is

on the rise, especially after 2014, and it will explode

in 2020. 2003-2012 was the initial stage of online

education research. Affected by the development of

information technology, the academic circles paid

less attention to this field, with fewer research groups,

less research efforts, and few published papers. 2014-

2019 is the development stage of online education

research. Although it has grown rapidly, it has

occasional ups and downs, and the fluctuations are

not large. 2020 has been an explosive growth stage of

online education research. Affected by the epidemic,

the scope of online education has been continuously

expanded, the forms of online education have become

more diverse, the research field has been broadened,

the research content has been in-depth, and the

research methods have been diversified.

3.2 Author Analysis

By analyzing the author symbiotic collaboration

network diagram, we can understand the important

scholars in the field and their collaborations.

The knowledge map of author cooperation

network in my country's online education research is

shown in Figure 2. The size of the nodes (solid

circles) in the figure represents the number of

documents. The larger the author's name is, the more

the author publishes. The lines between the nodes

represent the author's cooperation. , there are 271

nodes and 144 links in the figure, and the network

density is 0.0039, which indicates that the

cooperation between domestic researchers in the field

of online education is not close. In this field, there is

only a 7-person cooperation network headed by

Cheng Jiangang and Han Xibin, and the rest of the

people are scattered, and there are a large number of

independent research scholars.

According to Price Law (Price Law): the total

number of scientists square root, the number of

people who have written 50% of all scientific papers.

According to the number of nodes, the number of

authors in the field of online education research is

271, so the number of core authors in this field should

√

27116.However, more than half of the papers

in this field have more than 16 authors, so there are

no more authors in this field. No core author group

has been formed.

Figure 2: Co-occurrence map of authors in online education research in China

Knowledge Atlas of Online Education Research in China Based on Visual Analysis

423

3.3 Source Analysis of Important

Journals

Academic journals are an important channel for the

dissemination of scientific research results. Co-

citation analysis of journals can provide the

distribution of important knowledge sources in a

certain field.

Figure 3: Journal co-citation network for online education research in China.

Citespace selected Cited Journal to obtain the co-

citation network of journals in the field of online

education in my country, as shown in Figure 3. There

are 484 nodes in the graph, 1929 links, and a density

of 0.0165. In Citespace, nodes whose centrality

exceeds 0.1 are key nodes. It can be seen from the

network of co-cited journals that "China Electronic

Education" has the highest citation frequency, and the

journals are mainly electronic education, which has a

strong concentration.

3.4 Evolutionary Path Analysis

My country's online education research can be

divided into three periods, the first stage is 2003-

2012, the second stage is 2014-2017, and the third

stage is 2019-present.

The first stage of research on online education in

my country is mainly in two aspects: on the one hand,

through the analysis of the advanced experience of

the United States and other university libraries, it is

proposed to promote online information literacy

education in my country and build a related education

system, and its main development object is university

books. The main purpose is to enhance the

information quality of teachers and students; on the

other hand, when China enters the Internet 1.0 era, it

proposes to use the Internet to conduct research on

distance education. The articles at this stage are few

and scattered, limited by the limitations of the

popularization of the Internet, the research mainly

focuses on the feasible discussion and analysis of

online education for a small number of groups or

institutions, which belongs to the theoretical research

stage.

Figure 4: Evolutionary path of online education research in China

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424

The second stage originated from the "Ten-Year

Development Plan for Education Informatization

(2011-2020)" issued by the Ministry of Education of

China. The document proposed to "build an

intelligent teaching environment, provide high-

quality digital education resources and software

tools, and advocate network inter-school

collaboration learning and improving the level of

information-based teaching". In 2010, my country's

Internet development entered the era of 2.0, that is,

the mobile Internet stage, with a large-scale increase

in Internet users. In 2013, MOOC was introduced into

China, setting off a frenzy on MOOC research, and

proposed new development directions such as flipped

classroom, open university, big data + online

education development. This stage focuses on the

practical exploration stage of large-scale online

education platforms.

The third stage started with the global outbreak of

the new crown epidemic. In order to curb the spread

of the new crown epidemic, Chinese schools were

suspended on a large scale, and online learning has

become the only option for China to “suspend classes

and continue learning”. Therefore, online education

has once again ushered in a golden period of

development, and scholars at this stage have begun to

focus on research on the diversification of online

education. The research is centered on online

education, including four aspects: the implementation

of teaching activities, the guarantee of teaching

operation, the reform of education and teaching, and

the balanced development of education.

3.5 Keywords Co-Occurrence Analysis

Keywords are the author's highly generalized and

centralized description of the content of the literature.

Co-occurrence analysis of keywords can reflect the

research hotspots in this field to a certain extent. The

keyword co-occurrence network knowledge map of

my country's online education research is shown in

Figure 5. There are 318 nodes, 599 chains, and a

network density of 0.0119. The top 20 high-

frequency keywords are extracted and sorted in

descending order, see table 1.

Figure 5: Keyword co-occurrence network of online education research in China

Table 1: Top10 keywords of online education research in China.

serial number

Fre

uenc

words

1 208 online education

2 16 MOOC

3 12 Online learnin

4 11 Big data

5 8 Hi

her education

6 7 The remote education

7 7 COVID-19

andemic

8 7 Education fai

9 7 Online teachin

10 6 Factors affecting the

Knowledge Atlas of Online Education Research in China Based on Visual Analysis

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3.5.1 MOOC

With the rapid development of Internet technology

and knowledge economy, and the popularity of the

worldwide resource openness movement, massive

open online courses "MOOC" have begun to emerge.

Liu Hehai believes that the essence of "MOOC" is

online education, and the key point lies in its

"autonomy, collaboration, and interaction", which are

embodied in three aspects: curriculum design,

teaching philosophy, and learning process. (Liu,

Zhang, Zhu, 2014) Wang Xiao and Wang Zhiquan

believe that MOOCs have brought opportunities for

the reform and development of teaching in my

country's colleges and universities, but they have

obvious limitations in teaching concepts, teaching

processes and teaching effects. The positioning of

courses in college teaching, the construction of

excellent courses of MOOCs, and the teaching mode

of flipped classroom for reference, realize the organic

combination of MOOCs and traditional college

teaching. (Wang, Wang, 2015)

3.5.2 Online Learning

Online learning is not simply to copy the offline

classroom to online, but to understand its essence and

connotation, through careful design and organization,

and a new form of future education that organically

integrates with offline classrooms. Huang Ronghuai

and Zhang Muhua, from the perspective of super-

large-scale Internet education organizations, clearly

pointed out that smooth communication platforms,

appropriate digital resources, convenient learning

tools, diverse learning methods, flexible teaching

organizations, effective support services, and close

government-enterprise relationships The seven

elements of school collaboration are the basic

guarantee for the smooth progress of online learning.

(Huang, 2020) From the perspective of user

experience, Liu Shu believes that learning platforms

have a tendency to homogenize basic functions, and

user experience will become an important driving

force for the development of online learning

platforms. (Liu, 2019) Miao Dongling, Wu Zhao, and

Yan Hanbing constructed an influencing factor model

of online learning from the perspective of

comprehensive learning theory. They believed that

the three dimensions of content, interaction, and

motivation have a significant impact on the stickiness

of online learning. (Miao, Wu, Yan, 2021)

3.5.3 Big Data

The "big data" produced with the transformation of

computer and Internet technology provides a new

opportunity for educational reform and the

improvement of educational quality. Zhu Jiayi

pointed out that educators, educational institutions

and related managers should not overestimate the

impact of big data on educational reform. Personal

success is the result of a combination of factors such

as family, society, and school. (Zhu, 2016) Wang

Shuaiguo takes the smart teaching tool Rain

Classroom as an example to discuss the development

paths of colleges and universities to carry out

teaching reform and use teaching tools to carry out

blended teaching under the background of big data.

(Wang, 2017)

3.5.4 Higher Education

Under the interactive influence of multiple factors

such as information technology innovation,

commercial value promotion and the development of

educational equality and lifelong education concepts,

modern information technology represented by

artificial intelligence has triggered profound changes

in the higher education ecosystem. Wang Cixiao

pointed out that online education in colleges and

universities is faced with three opportunities and

challenges: innovation of educational service system,

reform of talent training system, and structural

development of educational resources. (Wang, 2020)

Hu Dexin and Li Linlu pointed out that the multi-

linkage of online education and higher education

reform has triggered a profound revolution in

learning methods and content, and promoted

subversive changes in teaching methods, content and

teams. (Hu, 2021) Zhang Nanxing believes that the

construction of online higher education courses and

their platforms in my country has a relatively high

starting point in the past 20 years. There is a certain

gap. (Zhang, 2021)

3.5.5 COVID-19 Pandemic

Affected by the new crown epidemic, the school

closure policies of various countries have affected

hundreds of millions of children and adolescents. In

March 2020, the Organization for Economic

Cooperation and Development conducted a global

survey on how education systems are responding to

the epidemic and the challenges faced by large-scale

online education. The study found that the digital

divide is exacerbating inequity in education; the

epidemic has highlighted the social functions of

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schools and put forward higher requirements for

teachers' expectations; China has certain advantages

in school resources and teachers' professional

preparation for online education, but There is an

imbalance in the distribution of resources among

individual students. (Xu,2020)

4 CONCLUSIONS

4.1 Conclusions

Based on the online education-related research

literature published by CSSCI from 1998 to 2022, and

using the information visualization tool Citespace as

the research method, this paper systematically studies

my country's online education research from the

aspects of publication time, authors and journals,

research hotspots and evolution paths. analysis, the

following conclusions are drawn:

The time distribution shows that the number of

articles in online education research, especially after

2014, has shown a significant growth trend,

indicating that the attention of this field is

continuously increasing, which can be divided into

three stages: slow development, rapid development

and explosive growth.

The distribution of authors shows that the online

education research groups in my country are small

concentrated and scattered, with less group

cooperation and more independent research. Only a

cooperation network headed by Cheng Jiangang and

Han Xibin is formed. At the same time, online

education research institutions are scattered, with less

cooperation, and most of them are Colleges of

Education and Information Colleges.

The published journals show that online

education research papers are mainly published in

distance education, open education and education-

related journals. These publications, such as "China

Electronic Education", are highly authoritative

journals in the field of online education, and their

citation frequency is also high. The highest,

"Electronic Education Research" has the highest

centrality, and they are all knowledge carriers and

important communication channels for online

education research.

The analysis of keywords and evolution paths

shows that the hotspots of online education research

are mainly concentrated in MOOC, online learning,

big data, higher education, distance education, etc.

The research content is also drawn from foreign

experience, the domestic macro-educational

environment, and developed into practical teaching

strategies. Research.

4.2 Discussion

With the introduction and development of online

education concept to popularization, the research on

online education in academia has also experienced a

development process from theory to practice, from

macro to micro, and from simple to complex, but

there are still shortcomings.

First of all, online education research generally

emphasizes theory rather than practice, focusing

more on macro-level and theoretical research, and

less on tools and platforms that can effectively guide

online teaching. Secondly, there are more qualitative

researches and less quantitative researches in online

education research, and the researches are more

inclined to the proposal and solution of problems,

with less effect and feedback. Finally, the number of

researchers in online education is large but the

number of leaders is small, the core research team has

not yet been formed, and there is a lack of effective

interaction between research institutions.

In the future, exchanges and cooperation among

scholars should be strengthened to jointly promote a

more comprehensive, in-depth, scientific and

objective research on online education in my country.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank the fund for its support: The National

Business Education, Training and Scientific Research

"Fourteenth Five Year Plan" project in

2022"Ideological and Political Construction and

Practice Research on Core Courses of E-commerce"

(Project No. SKKT-22068).

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