NPR News Reports: How On-Line Learning and Teaching Have Transformed Three American Classrooms

Washington, DC - As part of the NPR News series The Changing Face of America, Morning Edition® with Bob Edwards will explore how computers and the Internet are changing the rules in three of America's classrooms.

In part one, which airs on Monday, August 28th, 2000, Guy Raz visits the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to examine how professors are integrating computers and the Internet into a traditional university curriculum. These days, lectures feature multimedia presentations, course materials and class notes are distributed online, and office hours are extended to accommodate daily email messages from students. Raz will explore what kind of online teaching is working -- and what isn't -- for these college professors in the 21st century.

On Tuesday, August 29, 2000, Ina Jaffe takes listeners to Cal State-Dominguez Hill to examine one of the country's first online degree programs. The offering has been a hit with adult learners trying to balance busy personal lives while pursuing advanced degrees. Jaffe will zero in on two of them.

In the third segment, to air Wednesday, August 30, 2000, Claudio Sanchez looks at how laptops are keeping children of migrant families in school. For six months each year, 500 students at Eagle Pass High School leave the state with their families to harvest fruits and vegetables around the country. The extended separation from school made it difficult for many of them to keep up with the Texas curriculum, and prevented most from graduating. Sanchez reports on an innovative laptop program that helps them to stay in school, even when they are thousands of miles away.

For station information and broadcast times, please visit NPR®'s Web site at www.npr.org.

The Changing Face of America, is an 18-month-long series that tells the stories of regular, everyday Americans and the issues they face at a time of dramatic and rapid change. NPR News correspondents explore and report on such diverse issues as immigration, inter-generational conflict, economic development, urban growth, education, technology and leisure, all within the context of a changing America. Feature segments of The Changing Face of America will appear on Morning Edition with Bob Edwards and All Things Considered®. As part of this series, NPR's midday call-in program Talk of the Nation® is traveling to cities and towns across America for monthly broadcast forums before live audiences.

The series is supported by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The Pew Charitable Trusts invest in ideas that fuel timely action and results. It is focusing a significant portion of its resources on supporting programs that stimulate participation in civic affairs. These include initiatives that foster a citizenry more engaged in local, regional and national public issues and that provide information resources for the media, the public and policymakers.

Renowned for its journalistic excellence and standard-setting news, information and cultural programming, NPR serves a growing audience of nearly 15 million Americans each week via more than 644 public radio stations. NPR also distributes programming to listeners in Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa via NPR Worldwide^sm, to military installations overseas via American Forces Network, and throughout Japan via cable.