Distance education, a mode of upgrading educational qualification as pastime in yore days has presently become a popular mode of education. Paucity of time and adverse circumstances in life may hamper the formal classroom education of someone. Distance education (DE) as an educational endeavour is developing a momentum of unprecedented dimensions-covering most of the university and lower level disciplines with a large number of enrolment. More and more open universities are being established all over the world and more and more non-educational agencies, governmental and non-governmental, engaged in in-service training/instruction are now turning to DE to meet the overwhelming pressure of numbers, diversity of needs and growing awareness about the importance of professionalism. The overall scene points to what may be called a 'utilisation explosion' of DE courses and DE methodology all over the world. The institution of education has entered a phase of ‘change’ manifest in the progressive expansion and application of distance education methodology. The present work, in four volumes, is an endeavour to focus on vital issues pertaining to distance education. Attempts are made to gather the well researched material, based on the empirical findings of different scholars of repute from various settings.
