DISTANCE EDUCATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION: MANAGEMENT ASPECTS, HISTORICAL CONTEXT, AND BIBLIOMETRICS

The article is devoted to the disclosure and formation of a distance form of education from its inception to the current stage of its development. Migration processes and the growth of global sociopolitical challenges today necessitate a rethink of approaches to obtaining higher education. With the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the military aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, the issue of ensuring a continuous educational process in safe conditions has become acute. This, in turn, gave impetus to both the development of online technologies in education and the growth in the popularity of distance education. Based on this, the key goal of the work was to provide a bibliometric analysis to determine the state of scientific assessment in the field of online and distance education. The study was based on the search for scientific publications by title, abstract, and keywords. The period of the study of bibliographic data was from 1995 to 2025. For an effective bibliometric analysis of collaboration networks of scientists and countries, the VOSviewer version 1.6.16 software was used. Geographical analysis based on bibliometric data indicates that the largest number of publications was from Australia, Canada, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, the USA, and the United Kingdom. The bibliometric analysis covered 1,932 publications indexed by the Scopus from 1995 to 2025, covering issues of online and distance learning. During the cluster analysis of keywords, 6 clusters were identified: e-learning, distance education, education, internet, COVID-19, and digital learning. However, the area of implementing quality control in distance education in the context of implementing regulatory and legal regulation in Ukraine, as well as building internal university models of e-learning systems and best practice cases, remains insufficiently explored.