A personal learning environment (PLE) is known as a crucial support for educators who lead learners through the process of collection, creation, and organization of personalized learning tools. In this manner, the learner can interpret a variety of new tools in their own interest, which makes the learning process easier. The PLE approach represents a considerable movement away from traditional learning, where learners are considered consumers of information through isolated channels, particularly learning management systems (LMSs), to a model where learners draw significant connections from numerous resources that they choose. Thus, educational settings have implemented LMSs fully into their respective learning contexts. In this sense, LMS is identified as a learning platform that helps learners and educators submit assignments, share ideas, and communicate through web-based systems with numerous benefits. Under these circumstances, self-regulation is addressed as a significant component that explains how learners build and manage PLEs and come up with more choices; they take ownership of their own learning and enhance self-regulated learning (SRL) practices. On this occasion, there is a belief that teachers can utilize LMSs to shift from passive to active learning and to improve self-reflection (SR). Therefore, considering all the above issues, the current study examines integrating a third-generation LMS to enhance learners’ SR. This study considered PLEs by utilizing Zimmerman’s SRL model to investigate the integration of the third-generation LMS. SR is applied in this study in the form of a pretest and posttest following the involvement of the PLE course, which was designed and applied during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the experimental findings of the current study formulated a model of SR factors in PLEs through the LMS platform with partial least squares structural equation modeling (SEM) before and after the intervention.

The concept of personal learning environments (PLEs) is relatively new and is continuously developing. Over the past decade, there has been a significant upsurge in the number of PLEs-related research. Nevertheless, there is a lack of recent systematic reviews and trend analysis covering many PLEs studies; to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, the current systematic review is significant and indispensable in reviewing journal articles that discussed PLEs between 2000 and 2020. We searched Web of Science, Scopus, Sciences Direct, JSTOR, Springer, Google Scholar, and IEEE Xplore for studies published in English without limit in location or time to retrieve accurate results. Trend graphics for the extracted themes were also analyzed using descriptive statistics in Excel. According to the defined inclusion criteria, one hundred forty-eight articles were selected for the analysis. This study reveals that literature on PLEs has progressed from 2000 to 2020; the majority of PLEs-related articles were published between 2011 and 2020, with the year 2013 having the highest number of published articles (17 articles), followed by 16 papers published in both years 2014 and 2017. We found that the published PLEs research originated from 46 countries; 26 (17.6%) were from Spain. The majority of the authors had education, computer science, information technology and engineering backgrounds. This review also showed that numerous platforms had been used in PLEs research, with Web 2.0 the most commonly used platform. We noted that the most common objectives of the included articles were PLEs custom system development, analysis of the PLEs, description of experiments, investigations, development of factor models, framework development, and examination. The most common theoretical perspectives in the published articles were self-regulated learning, self-directed learning, and constructivism. The current systematic review and trend analysis can become a guidance platform for researchers, educators, policymakers or even journal publishers for future research in PLEs research.