Elsie Chan was born and brought up in the multicultural city of Hong Kong, so she was able to communicate and write fluently in English, Chinese and Putunghua. She started her career on her graduation from the Grantham College of Education, Hong Kong, in 1979 and has held various academic and administrative positions in a prestigious secondary school. She obtained her MSc degree in artificial intelligence at the University of Essex, United Kingdom, in 1989. Since then, she has been lecturing in various universities in Hong Kong, China and Macau, focusing on the development of the long-demanded open education in the region. Before her migration in 1994 to Melbourne, Australia, with her family, she registered as a PhD student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong but had to quit the research project due to her migration.In Australia, she held various lecturing positions, mostly on a sessional basis, while continuing her research in information technology-related areas. Her achievements during the period were the establishment of closer links between international students and a building up of the relationship between Australian universities and universities in China. In early 2000, she was granted a PhD scholarship by Deakin University, Melbourne, so she decided to shift to a full-time mode of study. Her research focused mainly on e-commerce and education development and, during these years, she published a number of research papers. She also attended various conferences on e-commerce including the CollECTeR conference, which was a pioneer in the international e-commerce area. She completed her PhD degree in 2003 at Deakin University with the e-commerce and marketing integrated research topic of 'New Educational Service Products: Tertiary EC/EB Education-the Asia-Pacific Region'.