Making the Transition to e-Learning: Strategies and Issues

Higher education institutions around the world are increasingly turning to e-learning as a way of dealing with growing and changing student populations. Education for the knowledge society means new skills and knowledge are needed and it means that lifelong learning has become a necessity. Higher education institutions are looking to e-learning to provide convenient and flexible access to high quality education and training that is needed to meet these emerging demands. As they implement e-learning, however, institutions are struggling with the many pedagogical, organizational and technological issues. Making the Transition to E-learning: Strategies and Issues provides insights and experiences from e-learning experts from around the world. It addresses the institutional, pedagogical, and technological issues that higher education institutions are grappling with as they move from conventional face-to-face teaching to e-learning in its diverse forms.

Mark Bullen is the associate dean of the Learning & Teaching Centre (LTC) at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) in Vancouver, Canada. His main areas of responsibility are curriculum and instructor development and educational research and innovation. Before joining BCIT in 2005, Dr. Bullen spent 23 years at the University of British Columbia where he was involved in distance education course development and e-learning research as director of the Centre for Managing & Planning E-Learning and assistant, associate, and acting director of the Distance Education & Technology Department. He has extensive international consulting experience related to online course development and the planning and management of e-learning. He has taught workshops on developing and delivering online instruction around the world, and has been a consultant on distance education projects several countries. Bullen is an adjunct professor in the Master of Distance Education at Athabasca University and in the Master of Educational Technology at the University of British Columbia. He has a Ph.D. in adult education, a master’s degree in educational psychology, and a BEd from the University of British Columbia.

Diane P. Janes, Ph.D., is an assistant professor, extension, with the University of Saskatchewan, Canada and is an instructional designer and member of the Centre for Distributed Learning (CDL), a research thinktank on technology and learning. Dr. Janes joined the university in July 2003, coming from the University of British Columbia. In addition to being a member of the core design team for five web-based graduate-level distance education courses launched in 1997 (now UBC’s Masters in Educational Technology), she has taught online at the graduate level since the early 1990s, most recently with the University of Saskatchewan, Cape Breton University, and the University of British Columbia. Janes is a reviewer and editorial board member for several international journ