With little fanfare and fuss, the administration of Temple University has pulled the plug on its venture into the for-profit world of distance education. Two years ago, Temple was among the first handful of institutions to establish a distance education company to offer courses--and potentially degrees--online. Although its faculty has been able to get more than 120 courses designed, Virtual Temple was a long way from offering all requirements for a given degree online, or from turning a profit. When David Adamany became Temple’s president more than a year ago, he said he had his doubts about the venture. Last winter, he began to acknowledge to those who inquired that the virtual university wasn’t going anywhere.

"From what I see, no one is making any money," says Art Hochner, former president of the Temple Association of University Professors/AFT and an associate professor of human resource administration in the Temple business school. Referring to institutions like Columbia, Cornell and New York University, which have all set up for-profit distance ed arms, Hochner notes that "it’s expensive to do if you want to do it right, but no one seems to know how to do it right." At the time Virtual U was announced, faculty and the union worried that "it would be given a lot of money and set up as a rival to the university." Temple University--the nonprofit entity--will continue to offer courses online, as its creative instructors choose to design and deliver them.

Check out Yahoo! education site

The well-known dot.com Yahoo! has created a special site for educators, especially those based in colleges, to put their courses online. At courses.yahoo.com, you can find tools to post course content, to create message boards and class chat rooms, to assign and accept assignments, to register students and so on. The site also offers online reference books for you and your students. And it’s all free, paid for by the banner ads at the top of the screen.