The changing learning needs of our society today, falling public revenues, the emergence of new online post-secondary education and training providers, the increasing "massification" of higher education as well as the promised benefits - economic, organisational and pedagogical -of e-learning, to name but a few factors, have all added to the pressure upon traditional higher education institutes to implement some form of e-learning. In response, traditional higher education institutes the world over have evolved new organisational models as well as trying and testing new e-learning technologies and pedagogies; in addition large sums of money have been spent all around by governments, private investors and higher education administrators on the many aspects of designing, developing, facilitating and managing e-learning at higher level. Clearly changes of great significance are taking place. This monograph is about these changes and their relative significance, it looks at various trends in the coming-together of two very different kinds of traditions: one very old and one very new: one, in simplistic terms, concerned primarily with long-standing, some would say pre-industrial, approaches both to "on-site" education (which is typically accredited) and research of a particular level; the other concerned with innovative technology-based approaches for education and training at all levels.
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