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It is a classroom without walls. There is no teacher in sight. Students set their own hours and, in most subjects, final exams are nonexistent.

Laurel Springs School in Ojai calls it Learn OnLine, and some education experts say it is a model for how millions of schoolchildren could be learning--if schools had the money and inclination to make it happen.

In the virtual classroom in use by Laurel Springs, a private home-schooling center, all instruction takes place on a computer in the student’s home.

Weekly lessons are e-mailed from teacher to student, who returns completed assignments via cyberspace. There are no textbooks, no lockers, no gnawed-up pencils.

In their place is a brave new world of clicking mice, CD-ROMs and Internet explorations of the Louvre museum in Paris.

“Children learn every bit as well at home as in a public school building, I’m convinced,” said Frederick G. Knirk, professor of curriculum and teaching at the USC School of Education.

“If the schools would just become a little more flexible, we would see a lot more of these innovations in education technology,” he said.

There will always be many children who need the structure and supervision of the teacher in the classroom and the valuable socialization skills learned in a school, educators say.

But online lessons offer the promise of options for students with learning impairments and physical disabilities and for those who are unable to consistently attend school.

For 19 years Laurel Springs has been offering lesson plans that can be followed at home, said Marilyn Mosley, director of the home schooling network. But it was not until this fall that Laurel Springs began offering online instruction.

Similar programs have been logging on across the United States in the past year or two. Prodigy maintains a home-schooling page that guides parents and students to ready-made lesson plans and educational resources.

Computer education has flourished in the home-school community first because it was not a great leap, Mosley said. Students were already being educated at home, she said, and receiving assignments via computer just made the system more convenient.

She said it also solved another home-school problem--providing students with a rich array of research materials. “We were getting complaints that students couldn’t get work done because public libraries are closed so often,” Mosley said. “So we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could just send them to the Internet for information?’ ”

About 42 students in ninth through 12th grade opted for computer instruction, she said. Many already had computers at home, had a strong interest in them and knew how to cruise the Internet, she said.

Others are child actors, including one of the three sons on the hit TV show “Home Improvement,” who find the convenience of tele-educating attractive. And some cyber-students enrolled so they could check in for weekly assignments, via modem, while traveling around the globe with their busy executive parents, Mosley said.

Granada Hills residents John Jacobson and his wife, Roberta, enrolled their son, Robert, in Laurel Springs rather than send him to Kennedy High School.

“Our three older children went to public high schools,” said John Jacobson, 49, who works at home writing user manuals for computers. “But that was more than seven years ago and things have really gone downhill since then.”

Robert, 15, turns on his computer at 9 a.m. and works until 4 p.m., taking one hour off for lunch, his father said. Robert said he concentrates on one subject each day instead of switching topics every hour or so.

“I learn a lot more because I get to stick on one subject instead of flip-flopping back and forth,” he said.

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After school, he goes in-line skating with friends or heads out to the hockey rink, Robert said.

In rural areas, home education via computer may prove more practical and cheaper than busing a few students who live miles apart to a centralized classroom, said Richard Simpson, assistant superintendent of the Conejo Valley Unified School District.

Children who are homebound because of physical or medical problems could be better served too, Simpson said.

“Clearly, it would be great if a student could be online instead of having a home teacher go out once a day,” he said.

Richard Clark, a USC professor of education psychology, said online education might be appropriate for elementary-age boys who suffer from attention deficit disorder.

“Many are obsessed with computer games and they can transfer some of that attention to computer instruction,” he said. “There is evidence to show that those who cannot control their behavior in a class can manage it in front of a computer.”

Online education might also be appropriate for a select few students who are advanced far beyond their peers and require more challenge, said Terence R. Cannings, professor of education at Pepperdine University.

“Some kids are already forming their own virtual classrooms by connecting with other students [via the Internet] in their bedrooms,” he said.

The school’s site on the Internet is at:

https://www.laurelsprings.com