PROFESSOR DR. ZORAINI WATI ABAS has been an educator most of her life. At the present, she is Dean of School of Distance Education at Universiti Sains Malaysia. She was previously the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic and Educational Technology) for three years at Wawasan Open University in Penang, Malaysia. From 2013 to 2015, she was at Sampoerna University in Jakarta, Indonesia where she was the Founding Director of the Center for Learning, Teaching and Curriculum Development as well as the Acting Vice Rector for Academic and Student Affairs.
Zoraini is Malaysia’s eLearning pioneer and advocate for online learning. She was Professor at the Open University Malaysia (OUM) where she led the Centre for Tutor Management and Development, Institute of Quality, Research and Innovation, and the Centre for Instructional Design and Technology at OUM. She designed and achieved success with the mobile learning project at OUM and trained a few hundred tutors and Self-Instructional Material (SIM) or module writers for OUM.
Prior to joining OUM, she was Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Medical Education and Media at the International Medical University (1999-2003). She had also worked at the Faculty of Education, University of Malaya (1987-1997) where she introduced the Master of Education program (Computers in Education) in 1991, the first of its kind in Malaysia.
She was consultant to the Malaysian Ministry of Education, National Center for e-Learning and Distance Education in Saudi Arabia and Telekom Malaysia. She has developed learning portals such as TM School Online in 1996, OLIS (Online Learning Interactive System) for IMU in 1999 and VeNUS (Virtual Education for Nursing Sciences) for IMU in 2002. She is Malaysia’s first MOOC contributor to an international audience in 2011. She was a columnist in The Star, New Straits Times and Utusan Malaysia with about 800 articles published. She has been recognised as a top two educator among 14 influential higher education leaders in Southeast Asia and received an Education Leadership Award from the World Corporate Universities Congress in 2014.