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Critical success factor
A critical success factor is a factor whose presence is necessary for an organisation to fulfil its mission - in other words, if it is not present then its absence will cause organisational and/or mission failure.
The majority of work on this in e-learning has been oriented either to large-scale failures, usually of consortium models focussed on distance learning, or on "hygiene" and KPI type success factors not critical success factors
Thus Re.ViCa has to produce a new synthesis.
A natural starting point is to start from a base of general theory and fuse the large-scale critical success factors with evidence from the benchmarking and quality arenas, concentrating on criteria that are critical not just useful ones.
Further reading
- See the BenchmarkWiki glossary entry on critical success factor.
- See the Wikipedia article on critical success factor.
- There is a sparse literature on critical success factors in education, but mostly oriented to large-scale failures of e-universities. See in particularLessons to be learned from the failure of the UK e-University by Paul Bacsich, which contains references to the other earlier work.
- An interesting paper on critical success factors in a more "normal" educational context is the paper on Ten Critical Success Factors from the former Learning and Skills Development Agency, oriented to the success of embedding teaching on key skills.
- There are signs of convergence of the "mega" and "meso" strands of critical success factors literature on universities - see in particular Critical success factors for e-learning and institutional change – some organisational perspectives on campus-wide e-learning by Su White.
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