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

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 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. (Contains 7 figures.)