Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 2011, 27(6), 863-880 Using learning styles data to inform e-learning design: A study comparing undergraduates, postgraduates and e-educators Julie Willems University of New England What are the differences in learning styles between students and educators who teach and/or design their e-learning environments? Are there variations in the learning styles of students at different levels of study? How may we use this learning styles data to inform the design in e-learning environments? This paper details mixed- methods research with three cohorts teaching and learning in e-learning environments in higher education: novice undergraduate e-learners, graduate e-learners, and educators teaching in, or designing for, e-learning environments (Willems, 2010). Quantitative findings from the Index of Learning Styles (ILS) (Felder & Silverman, 1988; Felder & Soloman, 1991, 1994) reflect an alignment of the results between both the graduate e-learner and e-educator cohorts across all four domains of the ILS, suggesting homogeneity of results between these two cohorts. By contrast, there was a statistically significant difference between the results of the graduate and educator cohorts with those of the undergraduate e-learners on two domains: sensing-intuitive (p=0.015) and the global-sequential (p=0.007), suggesting divergent learning style preferences. Qualitative data was also gathered to gain insights on participants’ responses to their learning style results. Introduction Over the years, the term e-learning has been employed in a multitude of ways. Coined in the late 1990s (Morri, 1997; Cross, 1998; Clark, 2007), the term e-learning was pervasively defined in relation to technology (Bowles, 2004) – the ‘e’ in e-learning – relating to the ‘how’ of the electronic storage of digitised learning materials (Clark & Mayer, 2011). At the time of its coinage, the technology in focus related mainly to ways that computers could deliver and manage instruction (Driscoll, 2002). More recently, however, the definition of e-learning has evolved to accommodate the addition of wireless and mobile technologies, and immersive virtual worlds. As a consequence, technology-specific terminologies are now considered sub-sets of e-learning (Siemens, 2004; Fournier et al., 2006). However, Wheeler (2007) writes that defining e-learning purely from a technological perspective does education a great disfavour as it considers only the technology and not the ‘learning’ aspect of the dynamic – encompassing education, instruction, teaching, training and tutoring (Anohona, 2005) – which, some argue, should be the major focus (Roffe, 2002; Oblinger & Hawkins, 2005; Conner & Conner, 2006). The ‘learning’ in e-learning relates to ‘what’ and ‘why’; specifically, “the content and ways to help people learn it [in order to] achieve educational goals or to help organizations