While growing up in Chittagong, Bangladesh during the 1970s, Badrul Khan used to dream about having access to well-designed learning resources available only to students in industrial countries. In the '70s it was unthinkable to have equal access to those resources. In the '90s, with the emergence of the World Wide Web, Khan's dream of equal access to quality learning resources became a reality. His desire for broadly available distributed learning systems and his scholarly grounding in the field of educational systems design and technology have enabled him to present a total vision for educational and training possibilities of the new worldwide communications technologies.

Through his teaching and publishing, Dr. Khan has been instrumental in creating a coherent framework for Web-based instruction, training, and learning. In his first book, Web-Based Instruction, he took a leadership role in defining the critical dimensions of this new field of inquiry and practice at all levels of education. Reflecting its enormous acceptance worldwide, Web-Based Instruction has become a bestseller and has been adopted by over 350 colleges and universities worldwide. Badrul Khan has the credit of first coining the phrase ‘Web-based instruction’ and popularising the concept. His second book Web-Based Training is a landmark book that covers all aspects of Internet's World Wide Web for training at all levels.

He continues to advance the discourse in the field of distance learning. His contribution to the field of open, flexible, and distributed learning is recognized throughout the world. As a result, his Managing E-Learning Strategies and E-Learning Quick Checklist books are published in several languages by several publishers located around the world. His 2007 book Flexible Learning in an Information Society includes case studies, design models, strategies, and critical issues encompassing the multiple dimensions of his eLearning Framework.

He interviews visionary leaders around the world who implemented technology based education in their regions or institutions for a regular column of the Educational Technology magazine entitled Interviews with Badrul Khan.