The Changing Shape of Corporate Universities

by David Baucus and Melissa Baucus

About seven years ago, technological innovation gave rise to the e-learning industry and the growth of
corporate universities. Early in the evolution of the industry, corporate universities represented a reasonable deployment of learning technologies. They enabled companies to deliver the right content to target markets
(e.g., employees, partners, and customers) and to reduce training costs by substituting technology for labor.
Recent trends, however, suggest that human resource (HR)-based corporate universities have lost some of their luster. Chief financial officers (CFOs) and business managers are exercising more influence over the use of learning technologies in core business operations by employing enterprise, organization, and workflow models.
In this article, we describe changes in the e-learning industry and corporate universities that serve to embed learning into the explicit activities of the workplace.

http://innovateonline.info/pdf/vol1_issue5/The_Changing_Shape_of_Corporate_Universities.pdf

Newsweek: Rise of the corporate college

CORPORATE LEARNING

Big companies are setting up university campuses all over the world to help produce the kinds of employees they most need.

Sending an aspiring scholar off to college is a cherished rite of passage in Western households. But in the global economy, where companies rise or fall on brainpower, higher education has taken on broader meaning and new urgency. Corporate HydroPower University in Moscow teaches plant managers how to wield turbine technology and rotor dynamics to deliver power efficiently to millions of energy-hungry clients. Engineers at the University of Petrobras in Rio de Janeiro must master the secrets of pumping oil buried 7,000 meters beneath the Atlantic. Forget ivy-hung walkways and fratfests; think enterprise incubators, virtual oil rigs, and mobile classes for transport workers in railroad cars. The alma mater isn’t what it used to be....

http://education.newsweek.com/2010/09/13/across-the-globe-big-companies-start-own-colleges.html