Addendum: CNet to discontinue Online University

Image via WikipediaFound on the media bistro site:

...After the jump, a former CNET teacher offers his vision for why the company failed: "poor management of the product."

The online courses product's death should be more attributed to the poor management of the product and not an unfortunate casualty of CNET's downsizing.
In 2005, the service was offering courses that had very high participation levels, at least in the ones I was leading. Topics such as wireless troubleshooting, PC troubleshooting and anything relating to digital photos was a big draw.
Then for some inexplicable reason they decided to revamp the structure by instituting a "learning hub" model, which grouped similar topics into one hub. The idea seemed good in theory, but they made a critical error in not specifying class dates and times as before. Instead, users could visit a hub at their leisure, ask a question in of the "courses" and wait for a response from a class leader.
What they did by implementing that structure was to severely undervalue the importance of timely engagement with users who were mostly novice on the classes they were taking. It felt to me like I was throwing them a deflated life preserver two days after they had drowned.

It got to the point where some hubs were so seldom visited that they were being assigned to class leaders in bulk, like 15+ courses at one time — just something to keep an eye on in case someone asked a question.

As a result, I was a given a couple topics I really had no business giving "expertise" on. The community placed their trust in us to deliver advice and guidance, and in most cases we did that very well.

But the inability of the product managers to successfully identify and stay appraised of course leader's core expertise, and create a meaningful learning topics around that was probably the worst offense.

According to media bistro, only a few course finishing up will remain until May 11th. In a note received from CNet to registered students:

The other courses, tutorials, and hubs will be live until May, then will be archived. If you worked on any of the content and would like to retain copies, please grab screenshots before May. I can't guarantee that you will be able to access it afterwards.

I'm adding this information for completeness. It's important to find out what works and what doesn't on the Web. Either of CNet's approaches might have worked fine. In the final analysis, it was communication that was at fault - even ending of classes so abruptly reflects this failure.