EVALUATING IMPACT OF E-LEARNING: BENCHMARKING Professor Paul Bacsich Global Campus, Middlesex University Hendon Campus The Burroughs Hendon London NW4 4BT United Kingdom E-mail: p.bacsich@mdx.ac.uk KEYWORDS Evaluation, impact, benchmarking, quality, e- learning, elearning. ABSTRACT This paper focusses on one main aspect of the economic and organisational impact of e-learning. It takes as a starting point the situation of universities in Europe, but in the context of the global market for higher education and the increasingly close relationship (not one-way but two-way) with the corporate sector and with other sectors of learning. It presents recent work of the author on benchmarking eLearning, with an orientation to global applicability and metric data (backed up and justified by process and good practice narratives) from “comparators” (not just competitors), arguing that this is the most appropriate methodology for European universities aiming to achieve excellence in eLearning in an increasingly competitive global economy. The paper is based on earlier work by the author and others on cost-benefit analysis of eLearning, which aimed to adopt a viewpoint that will work across the education and the corporate world, and in particular taking a wide view both of Return on Investment (looking at benefits in a wider than purely monetary sense) and of costs (encompassing activity-based costing and the stakeholder approach to costs). INTRODUCTION This paper is a review of the state of the art in benchmarking e-learning, with particular focus on UK universities but in a context of European, Commonwealth, US and global work. It raises the main issues, describes the methodology used and comments on the relevant documents found and agencies involved. Finally it draws some conclusions sufficient to start an exercise on benchmarking e- learning for particular universities or groups of universities. This version of the paper leaves out information about benchmarking e-learning in the training sector and also most of the literature searches which led to institutions without interesting information. Overview of Conclusions A wide range of literature was surveyed, including from the UK university sector, UK FE (post-16 college) sector, Australian and other Commonwealth reports, and several US reports concerned with distance learning quality. A range of European agencies, projects and so-called “benchmarking clubs” were reviewed. The main conclusions are:  There is a considerable amount of literature on benchmarking in universities but it is mostly oriented to benchmarking administrative processes. Very little is directly about e-