In on-demand education, students often experience problems with directing their own learning processes. A Structured Task Evaluation and Planning Portfolio (STEPP) was designed to help students develop 3 basic self-directed learning skills: Assessing the quality of own performance, formulating learning needs, and selecting future learning tasks. A…

WebTOP is a three-dimensional, Web-based, interactive computer graphics system that helps instructors teach and students learn about waves and optics. Current subject areas include waves, geometrical optics, reflection and refraction, polarization, interference, diffraction, lasers, and scattering. Some of the topics covered are suited for…

Reviews Internet tools for online college-level guided study courses (a term synonymous with correspondence course) and discusses bureaucratic issues that must be dealt with. Presents a model for an online guided study course that maximizes the power of the Internet while ensuring that courses are effective and manageable. (AEF)

This paper describes the use of commercial application and programming software to provide language students with self-access materials used in their own time. In all cases, it assumes such students will be unsupervised. The idea is that in place of buying expensive and restricted commercially produced authoring packages, a teacher with limited…

A middle school language arts teacher relates how she used the Internet to "scaffold" students' learning. She notes teachers have begun the shift from assigning rote homework to assigning independent work that gives the student the opportunity to test the information on his or her own, and that children need time to make the shift from…

It is increasingly necessary to encourage lifelong learning in order to keep pace with the Information Age. As learners increasingly take charge of their own learning, however, they will require support to enable them to achieve their goals--and a variety of learning opportunities will need to be created. Learners' interests, imagination, and…