Abstract—The concept of personal learning environments
(PLEs) is relatively new and is continuously developing. Over
the past decade, there has been a significant upsurge in the
number of PLEs-related research. Nevertheless, there is a lack
of recent systematic reviews and trend analysis covering many
PLEs studies; to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, the
current systematic review is significant and indispensable in
reviewing journal articles that discussed PLEs between 2000
and 2020. We searched Web of Science, Scopus, Sciences Direct,
JSTOR, Springer, Google Scholar, and IEEE Xplore for studies
published in English without limit in location or time to retrieve
accurate results. Trend graphics for the extracted themes were
also analyzed using descriptive statistics in Excel. According to
the defined inclusion criteria, one hundred forty-eight articles
were selected for the analysis. This study reveals that literature
on PLEs has progressed from 2000 to 2020; the majority of
PLEs-related articles were published between 2011 and 2020,
with the year 2013 having the highest number of published
articles (17 articles), followed by 16 papers published in both
years 2014 and 2017. We found that the published PLEs
research originated from 46 countries; 26 (17.6%) were from
Spain. The majority of the authors had education, computer
science, information technology and engineering backgrounds.
This review also showed that numerous platforms had been
used in PLEs research, with Web 2.0 the most commonly used
platform. We noted that the most common objectives of the
included articles were PLEs custom system development,
analysis of the PLEs, description of experiments, investigations,
development of factor models, framework development, and
examination. The most common theoretical perspectives in the
published articles were self-regulated learning, self-directed
learning, and constructivism. The current systematic review
and trend analysis can become a guidance platform for
researchers, educators, policymakers or even journal
publishers for future research in PLEs research.
Index Terms—Personal learning, personal learning
environment, systematic review, trend analysis.
The authors are with the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, Johor,
Malaysia (corresponding author: Sara.h A. L. Serhan; e-mail:
sarah.alsarhan@hotmail.com, p-afandy@utm.my).
Cite: Sarah A. L. Serhan and Noraffandy Yahaya, "A Systematic Review and Trend Analysis of Personal Learning Environments Research," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 43-53, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).