Mark J. W. Lee is Executive Vice President and Chief Research Officer with the Immersive Learning Research Network. He is an educational technology and learning sciences academic who divides his time between Australia, where he is an adjunct senior lecturer with the School of Education at Charles Sturt University and the USA. Until recently, he was visiting faculty at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. Previously, he worked in a variety of teaching, instructional design, and managerial roles at various private higher education and vocational education institutions. He has published widely in the areas of educational technology, e-learning, and pedagogical innovation, with 75 peer-reviewed papers, articles, and chapters to his name.

Mark is well known for his scholarship in the immersive learning arena. Together with his colleague Barney Dalgarno, he authored the article “What are the learning affordances of 3-D virtual environments?” (British Journal of Educational Technology, 2010), which has been cited over 800 times as of April 2018, according to Google Scholar. With Sue Gregory, Barney Dalgarno, and Belinda Tynan, he co-edited two book volumes relevant to immersive learning, Learning in virtual worlds: Research and applications (Athabasca University Press, 2016) and Virtual worlds for online learning: Cases and Applications (Nova Science Publishers, 2015). Of late, Mark has been investigating immersive ways of bringing together co-located and geographically dispersed learners to jointly undertake “blended synchronous” collaborative activities in real-time, and exploring how wearable augmented reality and other emerging mixed-reality technologies can be harnessed to create engaging learning experiences that combine aspects of the real and virtual worlds.

In addition to his role on the iLRN Board of Directors, Mark holds a number of other positions of leadership within the scholarly and professional communities with an interest in immersive learning. These include Global Co-Chair of the AR/VR Association’s University Committee, Chair of the IEEE IC Industry Consortium on Learning Engineering (ICICLE) Special Interest Group on XR for Learning and Performance Augmentation, and Chair of the FLEXspace Working Group on Research and Evaluation of Technology-Enabled Learning Spaces. Mark also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Education and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, and on the boards of seven other leading international journals. Mark was previously Editor-in-Chief of MERLOT’s Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT) for several years leading up to its merger with the Online Learning Consortium’s journal, Online 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 Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA); an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Managers and Leaders (IML); and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).