Professor G. Dayalatha Lekamge, E-Mail : gdlek@ou.ac.lk

Prof. G. Dayalatha Lekamge is the Chair Professor of the Department of Secondary and Tertiary Education, Faculty of Education, the Open University of Sri Lanka. She completed her Bachelor’s degree with a first class Honours and M.Phil degree in the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.  She was fortunate to obtain a Commonwealth Academic Staff Scholarship to complete the Ph.D at the Open University of United Kingdom. She performed the duties of Head, Dean of the Faculty of Education and Acting Vice Chancellor of the Open University of Sri Lanka. Under her leadership the Faculty of Education has introduced several innovative strategies to the teacher education programmes conducted through distance mode to strengthen their quality, effectiveness and productivity. She worked as a consultant to the Ministry of education and introduced a mechanism to assess the readiness of children entering to grade one of government schools under a UNICEF funded project. She initiated several national scale research studies in collaboration with the World Bank, Ministry of Education and National Institute of Education which had pave the way for development of a research culture at the Faculty of Education. Her expertise lies in the areas of Distance and Open Learning, Teacher Education, Education Psychology and Research Methods.