CEI to offer packaged short courses in a library customers can peruse

Emily M. Smith
ASME NEWS

The Continuing Education Institute will roll out an online library of short courses in February. The library will package 17 new ASME courses together with existing ones in a manner that offers customers greater flexibility and cost efficiencies.

Seventeen more short courses are scheduled to be added to the library in August 2004. Another 17 will be added in February 2005. This will bring the total to 75 online courses.

The ability to customize courses in blocks for corporate buyers or smaller groups that want to partner together to get discounts on buying a block of courses is expected to be particularly appealing, said Thomas Kuehl, manager of ASME distance learning. "The bigger the block of courses purchased, the bigger the discount," he explained.

CEI expects packaging courses in blocks to make inroads into companies, large and small, that ASME does not have a relationship with. Colleges and universities may also become customers, with CEI offering to give learning institutions a percentage of the ASME courses taken by their students.

Initially, the courses offered in the library will be available in English only. But markets for offering the courses in other languages are being explored, Kuehl said.

The library will be supported by development funds for the first two years. During the Summer Annual Meeting in June, the Board of Governors approved $171,000 of development funds to be used for the project's development and rollout. After that, Kuehl said, the CEI online library is expected to be self-supporting.

For more information about CEI's online library or packaging short courses to get a discount, contact Tom Kuehl at (212) 591-8013 or e-mail him at kuehlt@asme.org.

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