CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS OF E-LEARNING IN SRI LANKAN UNIVERSITIES - ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVE

It is a common trend today that most of the universities try to implement e-learning in their degree programs. E-learning ensures access to information about recent education, training and lifelong learning through the use of multimedia technologies. The recent growing trend of e-learning mostly benefits the developed countries due to some facilities like infrastructure, technology, relevant content and responsive learner community. The beauty of e-Learning is that anyone can benefit himself of the service that is learning or teaching aid from anywhere as there is no geographic barrier among the learners. And it is identified as a solution to the issue of mass scale student groups in universities as well. The e-Learning scenario in Sri Lanka is still a new era for the learner communities, and many universities are not so successful in implementing the e-learning component in their degree programs while some universities get the maximum benefit of it. Therefore it is clear that there are some issues with most of the universities linked to failure in implementing the e-learning. The study basically focused on the universities which use e-learning in their courses and identified the factors affecting their success or failure. In-depth interviews were conducted with the senior academics in the field and this paper describes the academics perspective of the success of e-leaning implementation. The factors identified are presented in relation to the life cycle stage of the e-learning. Key words – e-learning, Learning Management Systems, Computer Based LearningFor full paper: fmscresearch@sjp.ac.l