Virtual university

A virtual university is a university where there is a rather small core of physical organisation and people carrying out face-to-face teaching, and a rather large amount of distance teaching, usuaully nowadays carried out with a significant amount of e-learning. There is not an absolute distinction between face-to-face universities and distance teaching universities - most distance teaching universities in fact use blended learning for their offerings, often via a network of tutorial centres.

In essence, a virtual university is a university where the virtual campus is or has become dominant over the physical campus.

Further reading

1. The Wikipedia article on virtual university.
2. Introduction to Virtual Universities and e-Universities, by Paul Bacsich
3. There are many other papers on the subject and this wiki, over time, will aim to analyse and link to the most important of these.

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