DISTANCE EDUCATION STARTUP GUIDES FOR PRACTITIONERS - The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) CLICK: http://www.col.org has released a series of startup guides for distance education practitioners. The five six-page handbooks are available in PDF from CLICK: http://www.col.org/Knowledge/ and may be reproduced free of charge for noncommercial purposes. The five titles in the series are:

1. Editing Distance Education Materials, by Christine Swales (Distance Education Consultant, United Kingdom)

2. Support Groups in Distance Education, by Michael Robertshaw (Associate Professor, School of Science and Technology, Open University of Hong Kong)

3. Instructional Design for Self-Learning for Distance Education (David Murphy, Associate Professor in Flexible Learning, Centre for Higher Education, Monash University, Australia)

4. The Use of Multimedia in Distance Education, by Terry Tooth (Instructional Designer, Centre for Applied Learning Systems, Adelaide Institute of TAFE, Australia)

5. Managing for Electronic Networking, by Margaret Haughey (Professor and Associate Chair, Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta).

New distance educators will find these guides useful for covering basic concepts, terms and issues, while experienced practitioners involved in teaching distributed learning theory to others may wish to recommend them to their students. (NETWORKING ISSN 1206-9450 vol. 5 No 24 Jan 01)

NEW LATIN AMERICAN RESOURCE - The UNESCO Chair in Distance Education, held by the Universidad Nacional de Educaci—n a Distancia (UNED) of Spain, has published a new web site with the purpose of becoming a Latin American resource center for distance education and virtual learning. For more information go to CLICK: http://www.uned.es/catedraunesco-ead/ (from José Luis García Boyé, UNESCO Chair in Distance Education UNED)

ACCESSIBILITY RESOURCES - UW-Madison has developed a new "accessibility series" - see CLICK: http://wiscinfo.doit.wisc.edu/ltde/access/index.htm This 10-week course "Web Development Series" looks at accessibility first, and then in the following weeks, all the skills necessary to develop accessible web sites (registration required for this series, CLICK: http://wiscinfo.doit.wisc.edu/ltde/webdesign/index.html An additional resource page has been created at CLICK: http:/www.wisc.edu/doit/accessibility to help sort through getting started, validation, and all that is between. (from Alice Anderson, Technology Access Program Coordinator, DoIT, UW-Madison)

FUNBRAIN'S QUIZ LAB - If you are a busy teacher looking for timesaving tools on the web, take a look at Quiz Lab at FunBrain.com About 175,000 teachers use FunBrain's Quiz Lab, a tool that provides thousands of quizzes in math, reading, science, history, art, computers and music. Once teachers register for this free service, they can assign their students age appropriate online quizzes, which are automatically graded with results eMailed to the instructor. The quiz assignments can be completed in the school computer lab or at home. See CLICK: http://www.funbrain.com/quiz/ (from Gisele Glosser, eMail: info@mathgoodies.com)