About

About Mark

Mark originally qualified as a primary teacher and has over 30 years of experience working in tertiary education, with specific expertise in leading policy and practice, which supports lifelong learning and new blended, online and digital (BOLD) education models. Over the last 20 years, Mark has experience working in several senior university leadership roles and served for seven years on the Executive Committee at Dublin City University.

Before taking up his position in Ireland, where Mark was the first Chair of Digital Learning and Director of the National Institute for Digital Learning, he was Director of the National Centre for Teaching and Learning and Director of the Distance Education and Learning Futures Alliance (DELFA) at Massey University, New Zealand. Mark had strategic oversight of Massey’s online distance education portfolio in this role and played a leading role in establishing Massey University Worldwide.

In 2025, Mark returned to New Zealand after spending more than a decade working in Europe, where he led or supported several major European Commission funded initiatives. In 2020, Mark served on the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group developing a common European Framework for Micro-credentials. In 2021, Mark led a team undertaking a major state-of-the-art literature for the European Commission on the growth of micro-credentials and continues to maintain the Micro-credential Observatory. He was an original member of the Steering Committee (2019-2021) for DigiEdHack, a key feature of the European Commission’s Digital Education Action Plan. Mark is a past Chair (2014-2018) of the Innovation in Teaching and Learning Steering Committee for the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (ECIU) and was actively involved in the establishment phase of the new ECIU University. 

Professor Brown was also joint PI for the DigiHE project, which under the leadership of the European University Assoication (EUA), in 2020, completed a survey on the state of digital learning across European universities. He also played a key role in co-authoring a EUA report reviewing many different self-assessment and benchmarking tools for supporting quality improvement in digital learning.

In 2022, Mark completed an OECD contract and working paper investigating different quality assurance (QA) models for digital higher education. A follow-up OECD study in 2023 explored how QA is being addressed in the context of micro-credentials. In 2023, Mark led a project funded by Qualifications and Quality Ireland (QQI) to develop new National Statutory QA Guidelines for Online and Blended Learning Programmes. In 2015, Mark was previously co-author of a seminal report on Quality Models in Online and Open Education Around the Globe.

Mark has an extensive professional network worldwide and has served in leadership roles and on the executive committees of several leading professional bodies. Most recently, Mark was Vice President of EDEN Digital Learning Europe. He is an EDEN Senior Fellow. Mark also served for seven years on the Supervisory Board of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) and continued his strong ‘down under’ links serving as Vice-President of the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia (OLDAA). Mark is also a past Treasurer and member of Executive Committee of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education. ASCILITE is the peak professional body for technology-enhanced learning in Australia and New Zealand. Before taking up his position in Ireland, Mark was President of the New Zealand Association for Open, Flexible and Distance Learning (DEANZ, now FLANZ). 

In 2017, the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL) recognised Mark as a world leader in Open, Online and Distance Learning. You can listen to an interview with Mark as part of the Leader and Legends of Online Learning series.  In 2019, Professor Brown was Chair of the ICDE World Conference on Online Learning in Dublin. Mark currently chairs the jury (2023 – 2027) for the prestigious ICDE Prizes of Excellence in Open and Distance Education. In 2023, Mark was the co-chair of the EDEN Annual Conference. Mark co-led the Empower Online Learning Leadership Academy (EOLLA), which drew on his contribution over several years as a faculty member to the US-based Online Learning Consortium’s (OLC) Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning (IELOL). Mark was instrumental in establishing in 2023 the EDEN Digital Education Leadership Academy. 

Mark is a recipient of a National Award for Sustained Excellence in Tertiary Teaching and remains a member of the New Zealand Academy of Tertiary Teaching Excellence. In 2024, the Dutch Open University awarded Mark an honorary doctorate for his significant and sustained contribution to Open, Online and Digital Education.

Specific Areas of Interest

Mark’s main research interests are at the tertiary education level, with specific expertise in the following areas:

Mark’s Blog

This website also contains a link to my blog where I offer musings and critical insights on digital education theory, research and practice. The blog’s underlying ethos is to look for the light between the bytes as digital education is entangled in a much wider social practice. It needs to be understood as part of a complex constellation of competing and co-existing discourses or languages of persuasion, which often reflect very different learning futures. Hence it evokes fundamental questions about broader social imaginaries: our ideas about what constitutes the good learner, the good teacher, the good university, the good citizen and the good society.

Contact Me

I invite you to contact me if you would like more information or I can be of any further assistance. Please complete the contact form in the top menu or send me an email at the following address…

m.e.brown.nz@gmail.com