Blended Learning for the Indo-Pacific

Information technology disciplines make up a significant proportion of the degrees taken by international students at Australian universities. These programs are primarily delivered on-campus, but are increasingly using e-learning techniques and becoming, in effect, blended. This provides the opportunity to offer international students part of their program by distance education before, or instead of, traveling to Australia. This could complement the campus-based education provided and complement initiatives by China, Australia, Japan and the United States for regional development. However, Australian university academics have little background or training in e-learning and program designs have not made use of the flexibility this provides. In this paper, we discuss how computer professionals can be trained online to deliver online training to students of the Indo-Pacific. The application of learning theory to support distance learners is also discussed in this paper.