As tertiary institutions respond to some of the now well‐documented challenges to the traditional way in which they deliver education, by developing and offering e‐learning programmes across the internet, it is becoming increasingly important to evaluate the potential effectiveness of this approach to delivery. Although online learning has been associated with a number of educational advantages to learners compared with more traditional face‐to‐face instruction, the evaluation of technology-mediated education is, as many sources have noted, woefully inadequate at this point in time, of critical importance given the rapid emergence of such online institutions around the world. However, while some authors have attempted to delineate the critical factors leading to a set of accepted output variables, this paper examines the development of a pedagogically rich, e-learning environment, grounded in a constructivist model of learning (U21Global’s),and assesses learning outputs, in particular, to what extent it can lead to the enhancement of a learner’s global competencies and e‐learning competencies.

The research to be described has focussed on the development of soft skills or transferable non-academic competencies, for two reasons. First, many authorities in the area regard these as critical outcomes of good MBA programmes. Second, one of the criticisms that is often levelled at e-learning is the lack of development of such competencies. The argument is usually that there is no face‐to‐face discussion in e-learning programmes, and therefore many of the higher level competencies, like teamwork, leadership, negotiations skills and networking, cannot be developed properly. However, such comments have usually lacked any empirical support. It is exactly this area that the present research is designed to investigate. It has been argued by the present authors that there is a set of e-competencies, which may be alternate versions of the more usual competencies.

For example, studies have revealed much about the development of leadership skills. But, leadership skills in an e-environment, an increasingly important area of business, may be somewhat different, require different base skills, and a different environment in order to be well developed. Global competencies have also been identified by leaders in education as being critical outputs from MBA programmes.

Two approaches have been taken in this research to evaluate the U21Global e-learning environment in terms of these output variables. First, an attempt has been made to use the different assessment components of the U21Global programme to identify the development of competencies. For example,
teamwork is indicated by the team project assessment scores from which general individual academic achievement assessment scores have been partialled out. Second, a self-evaluation survey has been used to identify those competencies that are not just thought to have been improved by U21Global by the students themselves, but for which there is evidence from correlational and multiple regression analyses that supports the hypothesis that studying in U21Global will develop these skills.

In summary, this research has found accumulating evidence to suggest that this framework for online education leads to a significant enhancement of competencies, thus providing a positive evaluation of this current generation of online learning environments. Index terms: Online learning, e-learning, competency development, soft skills, educational evaluation, educational technology