Template:Virtual Learning Environments/Introduction

As society evolves into a knowledge society the need for higher and specialized education is increasing. The need for continuous learning, retraining and acquiring of new skills is becoming part of everyday life. Yet, the cost of education is increasing at an alarming rate, higher than food or medical costs. For a vast body of students quality education is simply unavailable and/or unaffordable. This is specially the case for many students from North and East of Sri Lanka, who have been deprived of vital educational resources due to the long civil war. There exist a significant youth population whose education was disrupted and need vocational training. Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) made possible by emerging Internet based educational technologies provide a great cost-effective opportunity to bring quality educational resources to these students and youth.

Pallikoodam is an initiative of Noolaham Foundation. The initiative aims at better education creating Virtual Learning Environments for Srilankan Tamil students societies with the world-quality. It helps a student having access to the Internet to proceed his/her studies anywhere and anytime. Environments such as peer-to-peer learning, social learning are included in the evolutionary part of the initiative. Virtual Learning will help those who are in need of self learning and those want to share their knowledge through Internet.

Virtual learning is the new trend of education evolution in modern world. Traditionally countries like SriLanka still follow a method of learning where learning happens through just content-based not application-based. Consequently, students lack of effective problem solving and applying knowledge in appropriate context. There is a gap maintained between knowledge and its applications in these countries. Virtual learning environments fill this gap including all classroom learning aspects and more. Large amounts of contents, self evaluating tools, peer-to-peer learning, experimental learning and social collaborative learning are the key factors which add values to virtual learning environments.

Targeted set of societies are being SriLankan Tamil societies. Even though there are multilingual societies in SriLanka, the basic fact, which leads the initiative to target SriLankan Tamil speaking societies, is that they are the only societies in an immediate need of improving their infrastructures after the local war effects. To bring a solution to education property, following traditional method of learning will not help at all as it is not cost effective. That will hurt those societies more and more as they have faced down fall economically too. Providing them with virtual learning environments will facilitate their learning economically and effectively.

Mostly volunteers drive this initiative towards its goals.