Rate My Professor Vanessa Chang

Professor Vanessa Chang is the Pro Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Business and Law at Curtin University, a position she assumed in September 2022 after serving as Interim Pro Vice-Chancellor for nine months and previously as Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor. Her distinguished career at Curtin spans over three decades, beginning in 1991 as an Associate Lecturer and Senior Tutor in the School of Information Systems. She has held pivotal leadership roles including Head of the School of Information Systems, Dean of Learning and Teaching in the Faculty of Business and Law, and Director of Learning Innovations, where she led project teams in developing Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and spearheaded transformational IT projects to advance digital learning. Chang holds a BSc from Indiana State University, a Postgraduate Diploma in Information Systems, a Master of Information Systems, and a PhD, all from Curtin University. She is a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society and brings extensive experience in higher education leadership.

Professor Chang's research interests center on information systems leadership, governance, data and systems usage in organizations, as well as educational pedagogies including immersive and online learning, MOOCs retention, e-learning systems, web-based learning environments, IT service management, and IT governance. Her scholarly contributions include key publications such as 'Sustainable Business Strategies and PESTEL Framework' (co-authored with Theodora Issa), 'Evaluation of Collaborative Learning Settings in 3D Virtual Worlds' (with Christian Guetl, S. Kopeinik, and Robert Williams), 'Attrition in MOOC: Lessons Learned from Drop-Out Students' (with Christian Guetl), 'Predicting Dropouts on the Successive Offering of a MOOC' (with Denis Helic and Christian Guetl), 'The Attitudes of Chinese Organizations Towards Cloud Computing: An Exploratory Study', 'User Behavioral Patterns and Early Dropouts Detection', and 'Trends and Opportunities in Online Learning, MOOCs, and Cloud-Based Tools' (2018). Through her work, Chang has made significant impacts on digital education and organizational IT strategies, fostering innovations that enhance teaching, learning, and administrative efficiencies at Curtin University and beyond.