MOTOROLA UNIVERSITY LEARNS SOME HARD LESSONS ABOUT TEACHING ONLINE - With 140,000 "students" and seven learning facilities worldwide, Motorola U faces many of the challenges known to large higher education systems, including poor completion rates for online courses. While the company has committed to providing 50% of its total training online by 2003, it is finding its employee-students less that enthusiastic about signing up for online courses, and even less likely to complete them. But, according to Motorola U president Bill Wiggenhorn, some new experiments seem to be paying off. "The resistance diminishes if you provide an online coach," he told Academy Online. "If you just throw students at it, you have tremendous resistance, and they never complete the course work. If you have a coach who students can actually deal with online, you get good pull-through." Other tactics include a learning "community organizer," enhancement of course materials to eliminate boredom and a focus on changing the company culture to support training online. "If a manger sees a person taking a course online in the office, then the manager assumes the employee must not be busy and may punish the individual with more work," says Wiggenhorn. "We need to make a cultural change and treat that situation as being equivalent to the classroom." Read more on the Academy Online website at: http://www.academyonline.com/corp_ed/index.htm (E-News from UCEA, No. 28, 28 June 00)

HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE PRIVATE SECTOR - Keep a close eye on the exploding set of deals being cut between higher education and private sector groups for content creation and delivery in the e-learning arena. For example, media baron Rupert Murdoch has linked his giant News International company with the 18-member university network Universitas 21 in a move designed to capture a large share of the rapidly growing global market for online higher education. More than a dozen new ventures that include higher education institutions aiming to take their e-learning projects "private" or securing partnerships with commercial groups are in the works. Key issues floating around the higher education community include: - Do faculty members own their on-line course content? - Can a faculty member use the name of their "home" university when teaching e-learning courses for another group? - What does the commercialization of a brand name university do to the asset value of the institution? In the search for rapid and large amounts of content, buyers are turning to universities - content creators and disseminators. This will get more and more interesting in the next 12 months. (TechLearn Trends #170 June 00 - for TechLearn Trends CLICK: http://www@masie.com)

TRAINING Ð IBM estimates that for every 1,000 classroom days converted to electronic courses delivered via the Web, more than $400,000 can be saved. For this year, the company expects 30% of its internal training materials will be delivered online, with anticipated savings of more than $120 million. (BUSINESS WEEK E.BIZ Cover Story, "How IBM Uses the Net." For the full story CLICK: http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_50/b3659005.htm)