Temporal issues in e-learning research: A literature review

Time plays an important role in all aspects of education from scheduling through certification. It is also one of the determining factors within institutions for distance learning where education is almost always time and place independent and for those learners and/or learning institutions making use of e-learning. Be tis as it may, temporal factors has not received much attention in educational research. This is strange since " lack of time " and " out of sync " are two of the commonest complaints encountered by learners in online educational settings. To better understand how research deals with 'time' as a factor in learning and education, a systematic literature analysis of articles relating to 'time' was carried out in the British Journal of Educational Technology, a high impact educational journal. A total of 966 papers across a period of 11 years was analysed for the presence of time as a factor in the research published. The most important result of this literature analysis was that 'time' played almost no role as a variable in research on education and educational technology.