WebED Contracts to Provide Online Staff Development for K-12 Educators in Kentucky.

Business/Technology and Education Editors

HAMPTON, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 19, 2001

WebED, Inc. (www.WebED.com), one of the nation's leading providers of Internet-based professional development training for educators, today announced the recent signing of a contract to sell its courses to K-12 educators in the state of Kentucky. The Kentucky Association of Educational Cooperatives, which includes nine educational service agencies, will re-sell the WebED courses to its customer base of 176 school districts and 74,880 educators and education staff.

"Members of these nine cooperatives are joining the growing number of education professionals across the US who are seeking out accessible, effective, and practical online professional development," said WebED Chairman and CEO, William O'Connell. "We are confident that our online course offerings will be an integral component of the Kentucky Board of Education's initiative to continue to offer training to teachers that can be used and applied in the classroom."

Liz Storey, KAEC President comments, "We believe this partnership will help our educators meet their professional development goals by providing an alternative to traditional programs. The WebED online courses provide a convenient, cost effective option that will expand our educators' knowledge base as they work toward Kentucky's goals and standards."

WebED serves a marketplace of more than five million K-12 educators and educational staff in school districts across the country with online courses in several subject areas, including Administration, Special Education, English as a Second Language, Science, and Social Studies.

These self-guided, self-paced courses are delivered on demand via the Internet, enabling educators to complete compulsory training 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. WebED's real-time, asynchronous distance learning model benefits educators through increased personal convenience, access to a broader range of professional development choices, current teaching resources, and opportunities to integrate Internet learning into the classroom. Reducing the need for substitute teachers and travel budgets, WebED programs provide schools with cost-effective alternatives to traditional seminars and workshops.

WebED has engineered a proprietary web-based system for tracking and administering its courses. It acquires and re-designs its academic content in cooperation with qualified authors, workshop providers, select institutions, and professional practitioners. WebED works in close cooperation with the national Association of Educational Service Agencies (AESA), whose 535 local ESA affiliates and over 100,000 nationwide employees are leading providers of educational services to US school districts. Through an affiliation with Endicott College, WebED also offers courses that qualify for graduate credit.

WebED is based in Hampton, New Hampshire, where it operates with a staff of experts in education, engineering, publishing, marketing, administration, and finance. The Company has established formal affiliations with a number of leading academic, philanthropic, and media organizations, including Educators Publishing Service, The Neag Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development, National Education Institute, Staff Development for Educators, U.S. Learning Systems, The Doug Flutie, Jr. Foundation for Autism, and New Hampshire Public Television.