Introduction to Virtual Universities and e-Universities

The e-University Compendium Chapter One

Introduction to Virtual Universities and e-Universities

Chapter 1 is the first of three chapters in Part One The e-University Concept.

It summarises work done by the author and his collaborators in the period 1995-2004. Chapter 4 of it, "A World Tour of e-Universities" is perhaps the first of such world tours, which made their appearance in several UK and EU project reports from then on to this day.

Paul Bacsich writes:

Re-reading this I feel it adds a lot of detail on an era not well documented in other historical material.

Introduction to Chapter 1 (by Paul Bacsich)

From the original report

This short chapter introduces all the chapters in this volume of The e-University Compendium. Since the remaining two chapters of the first part of the compendium are themselves of an introductory/overview nature, we felt it best to put all the introductory material into the first part.

The chapter is structured as follows.

1. This section is a brief introduction.
2. The second section gives an overview of the theory of virtual universities and e-universities and attempts to clarify our usage of the terms.
3. The third section gives an overview of the chapters, in an expanded table of contents.
4. The fourth section gives a "helicopter view" of the world of e-universities.
5. The fifth section considers a thematic approach to the material, and links forward to sections, subsections and “objects” within the chapters.
6. The sixth section gives an overview of the currently popular topic of Critical Success Factors for e-universities.
7. Finally there is a short section with some suggestions for further reading.

There is no appendix to this chapter.

All sections will give numerous forward references to relevant chapters and sections. To avoid clutter in this introductory chapter, there will be no use of URLs in the text (except for section 7) and the only scholarly apparatus will be a few endnotes, mainly for references.

The chapter is based on work that the author has carried out over the 2000–01 period and so comes from the same time period as the remaining reports in the compendium. Where newer material is mentioned, this will be pointed out.

Endnote 1

This chapter has been adapted, shortened and updated from a presentation at the UNESCO conference on e-learning held at ITESM, Monterrey in Mexico in March 2001. The material on critical success factors for consortia benefited substantially from the author's participation as one of the tutors in a month-long online seminar on this topic held by the Canadian TeleLearning Network of Centres of Excellence (TL-NCE) in January 2001.

Since 2000–01 further analytic work was funded by a variety of agencies including the Department for Education and Skills and the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

A full report based on this material was delivered to UNESCO Latin America in 2002.

A later snapshot of this never-ending paper was presented at the Fourth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Education, Samos, July 2003.

And material on critical success factors [was] presented at various venues (Sabah, Finland, UK, and Hong Kong) from July 2003 to July 2004.

The author is grateful to conference audiences for their feedback, which helps keep the material fresh.

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