SHANGHAI, China —The Departments of State and Education have underscored U.S. support for an APEC e-learning initiative that will use the Internet to share best practices in education and to promote international collaboration on Internet-based learning among the economies that form APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation).

The announcement was made at the close of the recent APEC forum where President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell participated in APEC activities last week.

"A global economy demands a workforce that has the capacity to continually update its education and skills through access to the latest developments in a variety of fields, from engineering to fiber-optics," said U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige. "President Bush has made education his top domestic priority, and the e-learning initiative advances the education goals and further strengthens the economies of our APEC neighbors, as well as our own."

The U.S. is involved in three Web-based APEC education projects that bring governments, educators and the private sector into partnerships to support education and learning.

The projects are:

• The APEC Cyber Education Cooperation, a consortium of the U.S. Department of Education and organizations from four other APEC economies —Korea, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore —that will develop an on-line knowledge bank for educators of best practices in education. The bank will focus on the use of technology in the classroom, teaching and learning of other subject matter, and the exchange of people and ideas. For example, to learn how Singapore students have achieved the best scores in the world on international mathematics assessments, teachers can access via the Internet curriculum materials and lesson plans produced by teachers in Singapore.

• The Asia-Pacific e-Learning Alliance, a private sector effort involving 10 major computer companies working with APEC economies to identify ways to improve education and boost productivity through greater use of web-based learning opportunities. The 10 companies, from the U.S and Asia, include: AOL Time Warner, Applied Materials, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Fujitsu Ltd.,Parsons Brinckerhoff, Saba Systems, Daesung Group, ACER Enrich, and YTL e-Solutions.

• The e-Language Learning Project, a proposal to help students and educators in the APEC region use the Internet to learn a second language, with an initial focus on English, Chinese and Spanish language skills. The web-based initiative recognizes that second language skills are essential for economic success in a global economy, as well as for creating mutual understanding among people. The project represents a prototype for education in the 21st Century and could be extended to cover additional languages spoken in other APEC economies.

APEC, a forum of 21 member economies, was established in 1989 to foster economic growth in the Pacific Rim region.

"The United States looks forward to working together with our APEC partners on these human capacity building projects to make our Pacific Rim economies a fully functioning, knowledge-based community," Paige said.