Advisory Board

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) - Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

John Rosenberg is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Deakin University in Australia (http://www.deakin.edu.au). In this role he is responsible for academic planning and quality, academic staffing and staff development. Deakin is a large university with over 30,000 students, and a core commitment to life-long learning. Over forty percent of Deakin's students study in off-campus mode and Deakin has been supporting off-campus students for nearly thirty years. Over the past five years the University has moved rapidly towards the provision of more on-line services and this year the institution launched Deakin Studies Online (DSO), based on WebCT-Vista. Every subject within the University has a presence on DSO and every undergraduate student (on and off campus) is required to complete at least one subject fully online to develop this important life-long learning skill.

John has been involved in higher education for over twenty-five years. Prior to joining Deakin University he was Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia (http://www.fit.monash.edu.au). This unique Faculty had nearly 7,000 students and brought together digital systems, computer science, information systems, librarianship, multimedia and business computing under one structure, creating new opportunities for cross-disciplinary teaching and research. Prior to this John has held positions at the University of Sydney, University of Newcastle (Australia) and the University of St Andrews (Scotland).

John, along with Dr Michael Kolling, is one of the creators of BlueJ (http://bluej.org). BlueJ is an integrated Java development environment specifically designed for teaching Java to beginners. It allows students to create complete Java applications as well as individual classes and provides a powerful facility which allows interactive construction of objects and invocation of methods. BlueJ is free to download and is in use in over 400 universities around the world.