Critical success factors of e-learning in Sri Lankan universities

Abstract

This paper presents the critical success factors of e-learning in Sri Lankan universities. It is a common trend today that most of the universities seek 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 is mostly benefiting the developed countries due to some facilities like infrastructure, technology, relevant content and responsive learner community. The beauty of e-Learning is 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 study mainly answers the questions what are the critical success factors of e-learning in Sri Lankan universities and to understand the present level of e-learning usage in the state universities. Further the study examines the academic staff, and students' perspective on success of e-learning and to find out the most effectively used tools in an e-learning system. The empirical data was drawn from selected one academic department who use e-learning in their degree programs in all five state universities in the Western province. The collected data using the two phased study of, interviews with the academic staff and, quantitative survey of the students were analyzed separately, the qualitative data by using similar categorization and quantitative data using correlation .. The findings specify that the success factors get differ depending on the life cycle stage of the e-learning. The major implication of the study is that critical success factors of e-learning can be broadly identify under the categories of Organizational, Technology and Infrastructure, Course related and human factors integrated with the interest and the contribution of the participants of the e-learning programs.