Mark J. W. Lee is an educational technology and learning sciences academic who divides his time between Australia, where he holds an adjunct senior lecturer appointment with Charles Sturt University, and the USA, where he is a visiting faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. Before entering academia in 2003, he was Head of Computing and IT within the vocational division of Australia’s largest private education provider. Over the years, he has consulted to a range of private- and public-sector organizations in areas such as e-learning and ICT strategy, curriculum design and renewal, staff development, and regulatory compliance.

Mark has published widely in the areas of learning technologies, online/e-learning, and pedagogical innovation, with over 75 peer-reviewed papers, articles, and chapters to his name. According to Google Scholar, he is the 12th most highly cited author worldwide in “learning technologies.” He also ranks within the top 25 most highly cited authors in “online learning” or “e-learning,” within the top 40 in “educational technology,” and within the top 5 in “virtual worlds” (as at March 22, 2018). A current thematic focus of his research is on creative and playful pedagogies and learning designs that transcend multiple spaces, temporalities, and/or modalities; part of this involves the use of emerging virtual-, augmented-, and mixed-reality (XR) telepresence technologies to bring together a combination of co-located and distributed participants to engage in real-time collaborative learning activities. Mark also has a keen scholarly interest in both teacher training and faculty development, in particular understanding the beliefs and beliefs-in-practice of educators as they design and facilitate technology-enhanced and technology-mediated learning experiences for their students.

Mark was the editor-in-chief of MERLOT’s flagship peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT), for three years leading up to its merger with the Online Learning Consortium’s journal, Online Learning. During his tenure with JOLT, the journal grew from a small and relatively unknown publication to one that attracted several hundreds of submissions per year, and to this day still ranks among the top 15 educational technology journals in Google Scholar (despite having ceased operations as a separate publication venue in 2015). Mark continues his service to the academic community as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Education and of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, in addition to being on the boards of a further seven other leading international journals in his fields of expertise.

In terms of his professional service, Mark serves on the Boards of Directors of the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance, and Instruction (ibstpi) and of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN). He is also currently heavily involved in the newly established IEEE IC Industry Consortium on Learning Engineering (ICICLE), under whose auspices he is chairing a Special Interest Group (SIG) on XR for Learning and Performance Augmentation, and co-chairing two further SIGs, one on Learning Engineering Academic Curriculum and the other on Competency Frameworks and Certification as they pertain to Learning Engineering. (Learning Engineering is an emergent scholarly and professional discipline that seeks to apply human-centered engineering design approaches along with data-driven techniques and principles from the learning sciences to create technology-based learning experiences and solutions.) Furthermore, Mark is leading a Research & Evaluation Working Group for FLEXspace, a joint initiative of the California State University and State University of New York systems that provides a global forum and open repository for sharing examples of technology-enhanced learning spaces and their impact on teaching and learning.

In 2016, Mark was named a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) for his distinguished contributions to ICT education and the use of ICT for education. He is also a Fellow of the Commercial Education Society of Australia (CESA), of the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD), and of the UK Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). As well, he is as an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Managers and Leaders (IML, previously the Australian Institute of Management), a Life Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).