A Review of Research on Machine Learning in Educational Technology

Ceren Korkmaz & Ana-Paula Correia

Korkmaz at the 2018 Ohio State’s EHE Student Research Forum, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

Machine learning can be considered a methodology in artificial intelligence. It utilizes algorithms for machines to perform certain tasks without any human intervention, the most frequent one is making predictions. We benefit from machine learning as end-users without realizing it. For example, thanks to machine learning, our mailboxes are trained to recognize patterns so that we do not have to go through a great number of spam e-mails.

Machine learning has been a hot topic in the field of engineering for quite some time, and recently the implications have spread into education. The 2017 New Media Consortium Horizon Report reports that artificial intelligence and machine learning will be widely adopted in educational technology in the next four to five years.

The purpose of this review is to investigate the trends in the body of research on machine learning in learning technologies published between 2007 and 2017. The methodology utilized for this review is explained in the flowchart below.

The exhaustive search process with a complete list of search portals is explained in the flowchart (Figure 1) in a brief manner.

Although different descriptors were tried on Google Scholar to obtain relevant results (e.g. “machine learning” AND “educational technology(ies) OR learning technology(ies) excluding engineering), thousands of results were retrieved. Because Google Scholar does not enable searching for specific documents such as peer-reviewed journal articles and also duplicates results, the platform was abandoned as a research portal. Instead, search queries were carried out on the following:

  • “machine learning” AND “educational technology, education” excluding engineering: yielded 1 result,
  • “machine learning” AND “learning technologies, education” excluding engineering: yielded 3 results, one of which was a book.

This research has been presented at 2018 Ohio State’s EHE Student Research Forum, Columbus, OH, February 23, 2018. Since then this work has been converted into a manuscript and accepted for publication: