Contribution of academics towards university rankings: South Eastern University of Sri Lanka

The aim of this study is to analyze the publication habits of academics of South Eastern University of Sri Lanka and to quantify the research output and make the academics aware their specific responsibility in bringing the respective university to world class level through research output. Bibliometric study of publications of academics was carried out by short survey and comparison is done with the webometric analysis based on Google Scholar, Web of knowledge of Thomson Reuters and SCOPUS Database. The finding is though the academics of South Eastern University of Sri Lanka has published their research findings in the form of books, peer reviewed, refereed journals and conference proceedings, very few of them are indexed in ISI and included in the Web of Science and SCOPUS database. This study recommends the academics to publish their research findings at ISI indexed journals with high impact factor and deposit their publications at Institutional repository in order to uplift the position of the university in the league tabl

Contribution of academic libraries towards sustainable development goals

This paper is an exploratory investigation about the contribution of libraries in achieving the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The study focusses on how libraries couldformulateplans to integrate the SDGs into all its programmes and projects.The studyidentifiesnine SDGs that require the direct involvement of libraries as well assome successful activities carried out by certain libraries for this purpose. The paper, after exploring the situation of academic libraries in Sri Lanka,found that eight universities in Sri Lanka have included ‘sustainable development’ in their strategic plans and academic libraries integrate them in library resources, services and programmes. However, these libraries are lacking in mapping of their activities with SDGs. The study recommends that academic libraries should map SDGs to the libraries’ programmes, services, and resources

Open access initiatives and institutional repositories: Sri Lankan scenario

The paper investigates the open access initiatives in terms of open access publishing and institutional repositories for scholarly communication in Sri Lanka. Relevant data from Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), OpenDOAR and Sri Lanka Journals Online (SLJOL) were analyzed to study the status of open access in Sri Lanka. Further, websites of all established institutional repositories (IR) of Sri Lanka were explored to gather the relevant data. Semi-structured interviews with Librarian of National Science Foundation and the staff involved in the development of many IRs and digitization projects were also carried out. Findings show that many libraries in Sri Lanka have established institutional repositories. The recently created national open access policy is under review. Different universities and special libraries such as science and technology libraries were granted financial and technical support by the NSF for digitizing their rare contents. However, all digitized contents have not been uploaded yet. There are 60 locally published journals available online through SLJOL, but only 10 journals have been listed in DOAJ. Though there are 23 institutional repositories in Sri Lanka, only seven repositories are registered in OpenDOAR

Open access initiatives and institutional repositories: Sri Lankan scenario

The paper investigates the open access initiatives in terms of open access publishing and institutional repositories for scholarly communication in Sri Lanka. Relevant data from Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), OpenDOAR and Sri Lanka Journals Online (SLJOL) were analyzed to study the status of open access in Sri Lanka. Further, websites of all established institutional repositories (IR) of Sri Lanka were explored to gather the relevant data. Semi-structured interviews with Librarian of National Science Foundation and the staff involved in the development of many IRs and digitization projects were also carried out. Findings show that many libraries in Sri Lanka have established institutional repositories. The recently created national open access policy is under review. Different universities and special libraries such as science and technology libraries were granted financial and technical support by the NSF for digitizing their rare contents. However, all digitized contents have not been uploaded yet. There are 60 locally published journals available online through SLJOL, but only 10 journals have been listed in DOAJ. Though there are 23 institutional repositories in Sri Lanka, only seven repositories are registered in OpenDOAR

Bibliometric analysis on global e-learning literature in Web of Science database: with special reference to Sri Lankan context

Study of existing literature on e-learning trend is a must in order to define the path for new research in the field. The objective of this study is to find the full range of scientific literature published since the emergence of the concept of e-learning. The researcher intended to get all of the literature published in the Sri Lankan context. Web of Science database search was carried out in January 2020 to understand the research trend. This study found 6934 results for e-learning after performing a basic search in Web of Science. This results covered 59784 citations. Though multilingual literature was found, 6,617 (95.43%) items were published in English language. Though different types of documents were included in the search result, journal articles were predominant with 5839 (84.21%) instances. USA and England accounted for 1003 (14.24%) and 828 (11.75%) papers respectively, which placed them as the countries that contributed the most. Considering the subject area broadly, the literature has been classified into 25 disciplines of which 1843 (26.57%) of publications falling into the Educational research category. The average number of citations per publication is recorded as 14.4. The top 25 institutions have published 1245 papers that received a total of 8026 citations excluding self- citations. The University of London is the most productive organization, has published 131 papers on e-learning. Among the authors, Huang, Yong-Ming of Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology has published the most number of papers (19) on e-learning

E-learning adoption for sustainable higher education

Electronic learning (E-L) is a profound transition that is occurring in education as a new learning platform in countries across the globe. COVID-19 pandemic has forced all higher education institutions in Sri Lanka to adopt e-learning to maintain sustainable teaching. This study identified the relationships between the main influencing factors of e-learning usage behaviour and, in turn, sustainability in teaching. Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) was used to formulate the research framework and hypotheses. The population of the study was comprised of permanent academics attached to Sri Lankan public universities under the patronage of UGC. The sample size was 357 for the given population size of 5399, and a stratified sampling technique was used to select the sample. The study used a quantitative method under the philosophical assumption of positivism. The researchers have applied Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to test the path association among factors. The result explores the path relationship between exogenous and mediating variables, mediating to an endogenous variable. The research outcome shows that attitude and perceived behavioural control influence e-learning usage but not the subjective norm. While behavioural intention mediates the relationship between attitude and perceived behavioural control and e-learning usage, the latter mediates the association between behavioural intention and sustainability in teaching. Gender, academic position and computer literacy level moderate the causal relationships of the factors influencing sustainability in teaching. Finally, this study concludes that Attitude, Perceived Behavioural Control, Behavioural Intention and E-learning Usage Behaviour are the factors influencing sustainability in teaching. This study recommends universities develop infrastructures, train staff members and establish an office for sustainability development. Furthermore, it recommends that future researchers do longitudinal studies and adopt decomposed TPB