Following the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2000, scepticism about e-learning replaced over-enthusiasm. Rhetoric aside, where do we stand? Why and how do different kinds of tertiary education institutions engage in e-learning? What do institutions perceive to be the pedagogic impact of e-learning in its different forms? How do institutions understand the costs of e-learning? How might e-learning impact staffing and staff development? This book addresses these and many other questions.

The study is based on a qualitative survey of practices and strategies carried out by the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) at 19 tertiary education institutions from 11 OECD member countries – Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States – and 2 non-member countries – Brazil and Thailand. This qualitative survey is complemented by the findings of a quantitative survey of e-learning in tertiary education carried out in 2004 by the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education (OBHE) in some Commonwealth countries.