Academic development of multimodal learning analytics: a bibliometric analysis

Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) has huge potential for extending the work beyond traditional learning analytics for the capabilities of leveraging multiple data modalities (e.g. physiological data, digital tracing data). To shed a light on its applications and academic development, a systematic bibliometric analysis was conducted in this paper. Specifically, we examine the following aspects: (1) Analyzing the yearly publication and citation trends since the year 2010; (2) Recognizing the most prolific countries, institutions, and authors in this field; (3) Identifying the collaborative patterns among countries, institutions, and authors, respectively; (4) Tracing the evolving procedure of the applied keywords and development of the research topics during the last decade. These analytic tasks were conducted on 194 carefully selected articles published since 2010. The analytical results revealed an increasing trend in the number of publications and citations, identified the prominent institutions and scholars with significant academic contributions to the area, and detected the topics (e.g. characterizing learning processes using multimodal data, implementing ubiquitous learning platforms) that received the most attention. Finally, we also highlighted the current research hotspots attempting to initiate potential interdisciplinary collaborations to promote further progress in the area of MMLA.