EJEL
Volume 7 Issue 2
June 2009
Special Issue ECEL 2008

The Identification of Key Issues in the Development of Sustainable e-Learning and Virtual Campus Initiatives

Mark Stansfield¹, Thomas Connolly¹, Antonio Cartelli², Athanassios Jimoyiannis³, Hugo Magalhães⁴ and Katherine Maillet^5
1School of Computing University of the West of Scotland, UK
²University of Cassino, Italy
³University of Peloponnese, Greece
⁴Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação, Portugal
⁵Institut National des Telecommunications, France

This paper explores a number of key issues that have been identified as being important in the identification and evaluation of best practice within the context of e-learning and virtual campuses. The 'Promoting Best Practice in Virtual Campuses' (PBP-VC) project is a two year European Commission Education Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) co-financed project that is aimed at providing a deeper understanding of the key issues and success factors underlying the implementation and sustainability of virtual campuses. The PBP-VC project team have been working with a wide range of stakeholders from a number of large virtual campus projects across Europe in identifying and exploring key issues relating to best practice and sustainability. The importance of developing a practical framework for identifying, evaluating and promoting best practice in virtual campuses and e-learning can be demonstrated by the significant number of high profile e-learning and virtual campus failures both within Europe and globally. In many cases their failure has been quite spectacular with millions of dollars being wasted as a result some quite basic errors in overlooking key best practice issues that have occurred across several large-scale projects.
This paper will provide a description of the different issues relating to models for best practice and sustainability that has been developed by the PBP-VC project. The issues identified relate to organisational, technological, pedagogical, student/user, financial, and consolidation aspects surrounding best practice and sustainability in relation to e-learning and virtual campus initiatives. The value of the models lies in providing a platform for discussing and exploring key issues relating to sustainability among relevant stakeholders. Also highlighted in the paper will be the initial development of an identification of different levels of virtual campus maturity used to demonstrate how initiatives can progress through different levels of maturity as they develop and become more sustainable.

Keywords: virtual campuses, e-learning, best practices, sustainability

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