Nor Zainiyah Norita Mokhtar has been in the education field for the last 24 years and has been in service with the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) for 22 years. She completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. Her research interests revolve around teaching and learning strategies, linguistics (particularly Pragmatics and Semantics), Intercultural Communication from the linguistic perspective and areas pertaining to literacy issues amidst children in primary education. She is the Coordinator for the High Immersive Programmes under the Flagship of National Education Philosophy, IIUM which involves a collaboration of programmes with schools in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore and Brunei in the near future.  Another involvement is with the River of Life Flagship in IIUM. This flagship caters towards the conservation and river care in Malaysia. She is also actively involved in designing a course  pertaining to sustainable development and has participated in developing the course modules and training of the trainers. Her tenure as a visiting professor at the University of Brawijaya, Indonesia, has recently ended where she was lecturing on TPACK as a teaching strategy in language learning.

She started her fellowship in COIL programme organized by the Barzinji Project under the Shenandoah University, Virginia, USA in 2021. She has collaborated in projects with both local and international universities as well as schools. Currently, she is in the midst of developing her third project in collaboration with the Shenandoah University, USA.