This paper presents a review of distance education literature published in the "International Review of Research in Open and Distance/Distributed Learning" (IRRODL) to describe the status thereof and to identify gaps and priority areas in distance education research based on a validated classification of research areas. All articles (N = 580) published between 2000 and 2015 were reviewed for this study. An analysis of abstracts using the text-mining tool Leximancer over three 5-year periods reveals the following broad themes over the three periods: the establishment of online learning and distance education institutions (2000-2005), widening access to education and online learning support (2006-2010), and the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Educational Resources (OER) (2011-2015). The analysis auf publication and authorship patterns revealed that IRRODL is a very international journal with a high impact in terms of citations.