The paper presents an overview of the current state of development of distance and virtual laboratories in Electrical Engineering with a special attention to the fields of Power Electronics and Electrical Drives. Based on a broad overview of the open Internet resources from fields of Electrical Drives and Power Electronics and taking into consideration the ideas presented recently at conferences and published in journals and own experiences, the challenges and ways of future development of e-learning in the presented fields are sketched. This survey brings an overview of the contents of real experiments of the remote controlled laboratories that are placed at various universities. A special care is devoted to preparation of the learners to experimentation, including examining their knowledge before joining to the experiment. In the Appendix a complete survey of distance laboratories is given.@en