In recent years, there has been a phenomenal increase in the enrolment of students in education in general and higher education in particular, which has put a continuous burden and severe strain on the existing facilities of higher education. Therefore, an ardent and urgent need is now being felt by the teaching learning community of making use of Virtual learning Environments (VLEs). The students instead of enrolling into regular courses prefer to ‘login’ from a distance so as to get access to the “course-ware” of their interest and other related educational programmes of their academic interest. Virtual Universities are now being depicted as solution to the increasingly demanding problems of higher education; especially rush of the students for admission to various courses and academic programs of their interest. These virtual universities provide ease of delivery, flexibility for usage of resources, technology to support collaborative work and emergence of more innovative teaching and learning communities that can further help each other in their common tasks. These virtual technologies are bringing sound, visuals and interactivity together and hence creating a learning environment anywhere in the world. Therefore, virtual universities are distance learning institutions that provide students with remote access to college courses and degree programs. The present paper exhaustively examines the way the virtual education and virtual universities are reconfiguring the landscape of open distance learning. The paper further tries to highlight the way the teaching learning material of various courses is being delivered to the student and other teaching learning communities at large.
Open Distance Learning, Virtual Education, Virtual Learning Environment, Virtual classroom, Virtual Universities
