Impact of digitalized-education upon sustainable education and practice: A systematic review and meta-analysis of literature based on pre-intra-and-post pandemic and rural education development

This study identifies the pedagogical impact and opportunities to the use of digital technologies in education. It applies the PRISMA methodology to investigate the available literatures by identifying potential barriers, challenges, and opportunities to the use and adoption of the digitalized-education, taking into account the pre-, intra-, and post-pandemic era and rural education development. By covering a seven-years period between 2017 and 2023, the study analyzed the modest contributions and pedagogical impact of the selected studies (n = 324) retrieved from the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases. The data analysis include trend examination, geographical and contextual diversity of the dataset, and thematic synthesis of digital technologies’ benefits, challenges, and implementation in context of COVID-19 and rural education. This was done using methods such as Concept mapping and Text mining by leveraging data visualization and analytics tools: VOSviewer, Tableau, and R Statistics software. The study identified “digital divide” attributed to lack or limited access to digital (learning) technologies, and online educational platforms or resources as the main challenge to the effective adoption of digitalized-education, and attainment of quality of education and its delivery by the educators, particularly in the remote or resource-limited regions. The study empirically sheds light on the theoretical and practical implications of the key findings and result upon a scalable and sustainable education and practices, particularly in line the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) that are directly related to the quality of education, including reduced inequalities across the educational communities and/or a development-oriented educational society.