Undoubtedly, next step into the evolution of Information Society will be e-learning because it supports global education, breaking temporal and distance barriers. In this context, Higher Education Institutions have to consider it as their global strategy and design their business models in order to remain competitive. Thus to define a competitive business model one useful tool is Porter value chain analysis. This article focuses in presenting an introduction to this analysis, noting the important issues to each case so that Higher Education Institutions could have a start point to plan their competitive strategy.

e-learning, value chain, value system, competitive advantage, m-learning, commodity, learning object, standard, on-line campus.