Research Trends in Online Learning in Higher Education: A Systematic Review on Student Emotion (2017 – 2021)

Online learning enables learners to learn everywhere and at any time in various forms and various educational activities including full-online, hybrid, blended, synchronous, and asynchronous. During the participation in these educational activities, emotions and personality play a significant role in parts of adaptive online learning systems among students. There is no review examining the broader aspect of research themes in online learning with student emotion in the last recent five years. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic review of university students’ emotions in connection with virtual learning based on 50 articles published between 2017 and 2021. Hence, the objective was to analyse the articles for concepts and theoretical background related to virtual learning and emotions and examined for publication trends and patterns, research themes, research methods, and research settings and compared with the research themes from the previous decades. This study is through systematic literature reviews by descriptive research based on the document analysis on previous studies and literature on virtual learning and emotions from online journals, gained from web-based journals and articles indexed by Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus. The general finding of this article shows that 70% of the articles used quantitative methods and mixed methods. Students’ emotions were mainly studied through online learning. Furthermore, the findings display that online learning in higher education is a growing field as evidenced by the increasing variety of research topics, methods, and researchers. All of the results were presented in detail with the relevant literature and recommendations for further research.