Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining in Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and the Metaverse: A Systematic Literature Review, Content Analysis, and Bibliometric Analysis

This study aims to examine the combination of educational data mining and learning analytics with virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and the metaverse, its role in education, and its impact on teaching and learning. Therefore, a systematic literature review, a bibliometric and scientific mapping analysis, and a content analysis are carried out based on 70 relevant documents identified from six databases, namely, ACM, ERIC, IEEE, ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS) following the PRISMA framework. The documents were separated into the following three categories, (i) Theoretical and Review studies, (ii) Proposal and Showcase studies, and (iii) Experimental and Case studies and were examined from different dimensions through an in-depth content analysis using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The documents were further analyzed using scientometric tools, such as Bibliometrix and VOSviewer and topic modeling through Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The most prominent topics, areas, and themes were revealed and the outcomes regarding the influence of this combination on learning and teaching were summarized. Based on the results, this combination can effectively enrich education, positively affect learning and teaching, offer deep and meaningful learning, and support both students and teachers. Additionally, it can support different educational approaches and strategies, various learning styles, and special education and be utilized in both formal and informal learning environments. The real-time identification, tracking, monitoring, analysis, and visualization of multimodal learning data of students’ behavior, emotions, cognitive and affective states and the overall learning and teaching processes emerged as a significant benefit that contributes greatly to the realization of adaptive and personalized learning. Finally, it was revealed that the combination of extended reality technologies with learning analytics and educational data mining can support collaborative learning and social learning, improve students’ self-efficacy and self-regulated learning, and increase students’ learning gains, academic achievements, knowledge retention, motivation, and engagement.