This report presents a review of the literature on the best practices in distance education and the views of accreditation organizations on assessment of distance learning at institutions of higher education. To date there is a good deal of information about how to initiate distance learning courses and some case studies of individual courses at…

This document provides information for managers in the U. S. Agency for International Development on measuring institutional capacity, including some tools that measure the capacity of an entire organization as well as others that look at individual components or functions of an organization. The paper defines and discusses capacity assessment in…

This book lists federal government World Wide Web sites for K-12 students, parents, and educators. The first section of the book contains descriptions, including appropriate grade level, of Web sites for students, organized in chapters that cover: the natural world; the environment; health and safety; the United States and the world; community and…

The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) was asked to determine whether the U.S. Department of Education uses taxpayer information to verify information provided by student aid applicants, and the benefits of increasing data verification activities, and whether the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) uses personal information maintained by Education to…

The principal of an elementary school in Burlington, Vermont, briefly reflects on her experiences with implementing requirements for interagency collaborations. She notes that while collaboration and shared responsibility are clearly valuable in practice, collaboration is time consuming and may or may not be effective, especially when forced by…

This manual contains training materials on full participation in independent living for a national conference for personnel in agencies concerned with independent living for people with disabilities. Preliminary materials include the conference agenda, background information about the trainers, and organizational information on Independent Living…

The participant's manual contains training materials for a national teleconference on the history and philosophy of the independent living movement for agency personnel. Preliminary materials include the conference agenda, background information about the trainers, and organizational information on Independent Living Research Utilization and the…

The Council on Higher Education (CHE) is an independent statutory body established by South Africa's Higher Education Act of 1997. Its mandate is to advise the Minister of Education on all matters related to higher education so that the system is characterized by equity, quality, responsiveness, and effective and efficient provision and…

Much-needed initiatives to treat the immediate and long-term consequences of child abuse and neglect are costly. To address steadily growing needs cost-effectively, federal programs increasingly require community agencies to collaborate in providing services to children, youth, and families. Moreover, policymakers increasingly aim to capture the…

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 expanded universal support to eligible schools and libraries. To administer the universal service program for schools and libraries, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) directed the creation of the Schools and Libraries Corporation (Corporation). As a start-up operation, the Corporation has had to develop…

This document discusses state child welfare screening policies and practices, presenting data from a 1997 survey that examined the nature of states' formal screening policies and number of initial allegations of child maltreatment that states screened out. Although all states screen these allegations before investigation, little is known about the…

Although the 1996 federal welfare reform law exhorts states to reduce teen and out-of-wedlock births, preliminary field research has found few links between welfare reform and pregnancy prevention, and the ones that do exist are often tenuous, hard to believe, and difficult to assess. States have established new and stronger connections between…

This report reviews auctions used by various federal agencies to examine the feasibility of using similar auctions to determine interest rates for student borrowing through the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) and the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program. The review identified 31 different auctions, divided into two major…

A final report is provided outlining a cooperative effort on the part of national groups to resolve the needs of communities through shared facility use and interagency cooperation. The report's first section presents the pre-conference written descriptive of each issue and selected background materials which provided conference participants a…

With the goal of enhancing cooperation and interaction among youth, youth organizations, and other service providers to the youth sector, this directory aims to give youth, as well as people and organizations involved and interested in youth-related issues, a comprehensive source of information on South African youth organizations and related…