UW CONSORTIUM TO CREATE DISTANCE EDUCATION AP COURSES -
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has announced it will create a series of
videoconferencing Advanced Placement (AP) courses for high school students. The
distance education nature of the courses is intended to make them available to the
state's rural and inner-city students, many of whom do not otherwise have access to
such courses. The courses will be developed under the auspices of a new
organization, the Wisconsin AP Distance Learning Consortium, created at the
university's School of Education. The AP Consortium staff will recruit, train, and
support 50 licensed Wisconsin teachers to teach 50 AP Consortium courses in
12 subject areas, with a goal of enrolling 500 to 700 students in the courses for the
2003-04 school year. During project years two and three, both the number of
participating teachers and variety of AP subjects offered will increase.

Nearly three-fourths of this year's freshman class entered the University of
Wisconsin-Madison with an academic head-start - AP credits. However, access
to AP courses is far from universal in Wisconsin. Almost one-quarter of the state's
public secondary schools - many of them in low-income rural or urban districts - do
not or cannot offer the courses. Of the remaining schools that do, only a handful
offer more than one or two of the 35 AP courses. Equal access to quality education
is at the heart of the new project, which will also create, operate, and maintain an
AP distance-learning clearinghouse for high schools throughout the state.

Project partners include: the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the Wisconsin
Education Association Council, the Wisconsin Association of Distance Education
Networks, the UW-Madison Division of Continuing Studies, and Instructional
Communications Systems, UW-Extension. Funding for the three-year project totals
nearly $1 million, including $559,208 from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund
for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, combined with $400,929 from
UW-Madison, the UW System and other institutions. More information can be found at: http://www.cew.wisc.edu/ap_consortium/

WEBFAIR - Registration for Wisconsin WebFair 2003 is a three-step process:
1) submit an online registration, with an instructor sponsor form by February 15, 2003.
Each project submitted should be accompanied by its own online registration form. No
registration forms will be accepted without a sponsoring instructor or principal;
2) submit a registration verification letter from the teacher or student's K-12
principal before April 1, 2003; 3) include your project narrative page on your web
site. Please be sure to read the eligibility requirements before registering. Teacher
and high school winners will be invited to attend a three-day summer institute on the
UW-Stout campus August 13-15. Winning teams of no more than 3 individuals will
be identified: http://webfair.wisc.edu/register02.htm

TTT - The November 27, 2002, vol. 9 no 3 issue of Teaching with Technology
Today (TTT) is at: http://www.uwsa.edu/ttt/

* Editor's eMailbag: http://www.uwsa.edu/ttt/articles/letters2.htm
* Hi-Tech Presentations: Are They Powerful or Pointless? by Christy Carello,
UW-Eau Claire: http://www.uwsa.edu/ttt/articles/carello.htm
* Expanding Our IDEAS by John Fischer, IDEAS Project Director:
http://www.uwsa.edu/ttt/articles/fischer.htm
* Book Review - Web Portals and Higher Educations: Technologies to Make
IT Personal by AnnMarie Johnson, UW Oshkosh:
http://www.uwsa.edu/ttt/articles/johnson3.htm
(Tammy Kempfert, TTT Editor, UW System)

UWs DOT.EDU AND NIIT TO PARTNER - dot.edu, the University of
Wisconsin's educational application service provider, will partner with NIIT, a
training company, to offer programs to external customers in higher education
institutions, public and private schools, and agencies. dot.edu was originally created
to respond to requests for web-based learning from the university's 28 locations.
Rather than replicate services to accommodate each location's requests, the school
set up a centralized distributed learning system based on an ASP model. Key
services at dot.edu include hosting, training, instructional design, consultation, and
help desk for web-based learning systems and are now being used by 83
customers nationwide, including 55 locations outside the UW System. (UW dot.edu)