Digitalization of Education: Scientific Consistency vs. Radical Change Under the Impact of COVID-19?

Abstract

Recently, the digitalization of education has been one of the dynamically developed issues across whole the levels of educational systems. However, the dynamic of the research in this area has accelerated much more than it has been originally expected via extrapolating the time line of research activities. The reason is mainly the pandemic COVID-19 and its impact on the distance learning and ICT technologies incorporation into standard educational processes without previous testing phase. Thus, even the attention paid to the digitalization of education has raised, its practical range has growth unproportionally and current situation has shown that in many aspects real practical needs are not covered by appropriate theoretical approaches. Following this fact, the aim of this paper is to analyse trends in the scientific approaches to the digitalization of education and to state whether there is consistency or radical change in detected trends under the impact of COVID-19. The scientific contribution of the fulfilment of such an aim consists in the identification of convergence eventually divergence between the theory and practice of selected field. Methodologically, bibliometric analysis provided in scope of Web of Science database via VOSviewer platform has been chosen as appropriate one. Based on such an approach, it has been analysed the basic dataset from years 2019-2021 where the consistency resp. radical change in the trends in the digitalization of education under the impact of pandemic COVID-19 has been identified. On the case study of this issue, the intensity of interactions between cotemporary theory and practice can be prospectively discussed in wider context of the usefulness of the science.