Maria Zeniou is a Special Scientist at  the Department of Communication and Internet Studies at the University of Technology Cyprus. She is also an Assistant Professor at UCLan Cyprus. She was an academic faculty member at the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University UK where she worked as a Lecturer in e-research and Technology enhanced learning. She has a PhD form the UK Open University (full funded scholarship), and an MA in Education and the Mass Media from the University of Manchester. She has worked at the Cyprus Open University as an Adjunct Faculty, as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Sydney, Australia and as a postdoctoral researcher at Lancaster. Her research interests focus at a)research methodologies in the social sciences and he ways in which they are influenced by the emergence of new technology, b)knowledge construction processes in higher education and at the workplace and c)in open and distance learning. Her PhD has been published by  Verlag Dr Müller, she has written over 30 international publications and has presented over 30 papers in international academic conferences including a keynote. She has 10 invited presentations and she has participated in research programmes in Cyprus, the UK (EU and UK funded) as a principal investigator, academic lead and postdoctoral researcher. She was supervised over 100 postgraduate studies and 10 PhD studies.