Author Description

Nick Van Dam's dissertation on the rise of e-Learning. From the Introduction: "The arrival of the Internet has led to a related innovation in the approach to training and learning, and a new term has been coined to characterize this new phenomenon: e-Learning. In his November 1999 keynote speech to the 1999 Comdex Trade Show, in Las Vegas, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, described e-Learning as the next killer application. “The biggest growth in the Internet, and the area that will prove to be one of the biggest agents of change, will be in online training, or e-Learning... Through e-Learning employees will be able to take more control of their jobs, while the dispossessed of the world will be able to make strides to improve their economic position. The primary load on the Internet is email, but email is a rounding error compared with e-Learning. Many authors suggest that e-Learning growth is fueled by a number of factors, for example: rapid technological change; shortening product development cycles; lack of skilled personnel; the shift from the industrial to the knowledge era; enterprise resource planning; migration towards value chain integration; e-business; increasingly global business environment; cost reduction; shortening time-to-competence; and people commitment, among others. It appears that business drivers may generate investments in various activities including e-Learning. Therefore, I will try to identify and assess the most important business drivers which may generate investments in e-Learning."