Analysis of scientific production on virtual and blended university teaching in high impact Spanish journals

Abstract

The transformations produced by the development of information and communication technologies have led to the total or partial virtualization of the management, communication and teaching-learning processes of university education. 15% of university students are enrolled in non-face-to-face institutions while face-to-face include virtual environments that lead to a generalization of blended learning. As a consequence, researchers approach this new educational reality from multiple perspectives. This study presents an analytical-quantitative review of the scientific production on virtual and blended university education published between 2007 and 2020 in the Spanish Education journals included in the Journal Citation Reports in 2019. Through the comparative use of Web of Science and Scopus databases, 72 studies that meet the established criteria are detected and analyzed using the main bibliometric indicators and content analysis. The results highlight the impact of UNED publications, the predominance of empirical methods and the regular use of questionnaires. Despite the low representation of scientific literature reviews, they are among the articles with the highest number of citations. This work allows knowing the evolution of scientific production, tracing the profile of the main authors and their institutions, and analyzing in detail the research methods and techniques used by the studies with the greatest impact.