Bermuda insurance company Allied World Assurance Company, Ltd. (AWAC) announced yesterday that it has donated $110,000 to Whitney Institute in support of the middle school's new online curriculum project scheduled to start in September 2004.

Michael Morrison, AWAC's deputy chairman, said: "The prime focus of our corporate donor programme is the youth of Bermuda through education, sports and human services.

"The Whitney project fits very well with that goal. One of our staff saw Whitney Institute's presentation to the donor forum and thought it was great so we contacted Whitney Institute to get a first hand view."

Mr. Morrison said that after Whitney Institute principal Freddie Evans explained the benefits and the success in Texas, the company agreed to donate $10,000 upfront, with a commitment to $25,000 per year for the next four years.

The company said it hopes that this online curriculum will take off in Bermuda like it did in Texas and be the model for all schools in Bermuda in the future and producing the same results as it did in Texas.

According to Mr. Evans, the project will enhance the existing Bermuda middle-school curriculum. The programme will run in partnership with the Ministry of Education and the Plano (Texas) Independent School District, where the online curriculum was first developed four years ago."We are grateful to AWAC for their assistance in providing this opportunity," Mr Evans said.

"The online curriculum offers exciting new benefits for both students and teachers. It contains sample lesson plans with all the resources for teachers built in, so teachers can get on with teaching and not get weighed down by administrative details.

"It encourages cooperative learning, active learning and individualised instruction to meet the needs of all students, from the gifted to those who benefit from learning support."

Mr. Evans gained first-hand experience with the online curriculum when he worked as an assistant principal for the Plano Independent School District, he said.

It has since expanded to seven other school districts within Texas and one district in Louisiana and Oklahoma and California use it.

"When I met with the teachers in Plano, I was impressed by the energy and enthusiasm they had for the system," said Mr. Evans. "When I came back to Whitney, I talked to the teachers here about it. I explained that results from the Texas schools using the system were consistently better than from the schools without it."

Gareth Davies, deputy principal of Whitney Institute, said: "We're always on the lookout for ways of making the system better. When we saw the Plano system, something clicked. There was ready curriculum content for the teachers ? they didn't have to reinvent the wheel ? and testing was linked to the contents of the curriculum. We believe that with greater engagement, there will be greater achievement."The new programme is a comprehensive, middle-school curriculum for mathematics, science, social studies and language arts that has been modified to suit Bermuda, said AWAC.

It added in a release that the delivery was completely electronic, via computers and the Internet. Over 20,000 documents with activities, labs, Power Point presentations, streaming videos, links to content-supporting websites and assessments, are stored in a custom-designed database and delivered to teachers online. These documents are edited and revised constantly, and the system has the ability to update instantaneously to teacher workstations at school or home.