Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic changed our daily activities from socializing to work routines and established new research directions. The pandemic made us more responsible in terms of compliance with protection measures and increased attention paid to those around us. Like all other activities, the higher education process changed due to forced lockdowns worldwide. Students and teachers were forced to adapt immediately to online education. Many challenges arose at that time such as access to technology, prior knowledge of online educational process management, students engagement, and probably the most important topic, the assurance of well-being for both students and teachers during the pandemic. Researchers started to address these challenges and many others related to the COVID 19 pandemic influence on higher education in the last year. The purpose of this paper is to present a bibliometric analysis of the research studies in higher education and to highlight their connections with the COVID-19 pandemic challenges. This study uses VOSviewer software to create a better overview of the recent publications in higher education. The input for this analysis consists of the publications indexed in Clarivate Analytics, known also as ISI Web of Science (WoS). The main outcome will be the identification of the more researched topics related to higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic. This bibliometric study will also show a short comparison of the number of publications before and during the pandemic to highlight better the increasing research interest in the higher education process.

Keywords:

Bibliometric analysis, COVID-19, higher education, hybrid education, online education, students engagement, VOSviewer.