CUES University

Welcome to the CUES Online University Visitor's Center. Use the chart below to search for a specific kind of information about CUES Online University, or scroll through this entire document to get an overview.

CUES Online University is the world’s first virtual training and information center for employees in credit unions. CUES Online University is designed especially for employees of the credit unions. Our major objective is to deliver quality training at a fraction of the cost of conventional methods. CUESU’s courses do not replace training and information that involves considerable interaction with instructors or group interaction, but it addresses the needs of a high percentage of your training at a fraction of the cost you are now spending. Equally important, CUESU’s cost-effective training and information will mean that more employees can be trained on more topics for less money.

CUESU is on the leading edge of a new wave of advances in training technology. We are using state-of-the-art technology combined with tried-and-true training methodologies, pedagogy, and content. It is, first and foremost, content that sells our courses. However, we have also used new technologies to make our courses easy to use, effective, and inexpensive.

CUESU's courses are especially good for:

Pretraining: Allowing employees to get a basic foundation in a topic before on-the-job or classroom training begins.

Cross-training: Providing employees with a low-cost way to learn about other activities of the firm.

Retraining: Giving employees the opportunity to quickly brush up on the nearly 70% of content that is forgotten in many traditional training sessions.

New employee training: Providing new employees a strong foundation of understanding about the financial services industry, its new technologies, and its competitive setting.

Updating training: Assisting employees with updated training information to keep up with changes in the legal, regulatory, technical, and competitive environment.

With CUES Online University, the expensive classroom and off-site training can be minimized and selectively used for topics that require interaction with instructors or other employees.

Convenience: CUESU ’s courses are available wherever you have an online hookup; at home, on the road, or in the office. With CUES Online University, you don’t have to wait for a classroom-style course to be offered. Professionals can complete training when and where they want because CUESU’s training is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Course administration features built in: End-of-course achievement tests, certificates of achievement, and checkpoint questions after each chapter make administration of CUESU courses a snap.

Cost effective: Unlimited access is designed to encourage firms to increase the amount of training they offer. Price will no longer be the inhibitor to providing quality training to employees. Don’t spend money on travel, meals, and time away from work. Avoid the cost of ordering and shipping written materials and tapes. CUESU courses are so inexpensive employees can take them several times without fear of wasting corporate resources. CUESU has subscribers with as few as 2 employees and others with over 500 employees.

Designed for professionals: Content is written for employees of financial institutions who need practical information. CUES Online University has avoided long, involved details to focus instead on usable information that can be immediately put to work on the job.

Designed to leverage the Internet’s vast resources: CUESU’s courses include links to other Internet sites providing professionals access to additional learning material. Most courses contain 10 to 15 hotlinks to related sites.

New and updated courses: CUES Online University is committed to creating new courses. Existing courses are updated on an ongoing basis as events and student feedback dictates. Subscribers will obtain access to new and updated courses immediately at no additional charge.

Designed to allow for learning at the employee’s own pace: CUESU's courses can be completed at the pace of the professional. Familiar material can be quickly reviewed and new material studied slowly. Courses do not have to be

Designed to allow for employee testing: Each course includes end-of-chapter "Checkpoints," which are questions that students can answer in written form. Courses also include "Interactive Self Tests" which consist of multiple choice questions. Employers can require employees to answer these questions to insure successful training.

Glossary of terms included: Those courses that include a number of technical terms include hotword links to a glossary which can be accessed online during the course. CUES Online University also provides access to over 10 financial dictionaries and glossaries.

No online training program offers more different interactive learning tools than Digital University. Consider the following:

Animations (Audio/Video)
Self tests (every chapter)
Essays
Crosswords
Links (to additional information in every course)
Calculators

These learning tools are judiciously designed to assist learning but not take up valuable learning time with frivolous games. Training is too expensive for that.

CUES University Plus is an upgrade for the very successful CUES Online University. It contains the same courses and information features, but also includes CUES's powerful learning management system. Some of the features of this system allow the training administrator to:

Print up-to-date tracking reports
Offer more different interactive features
Record and report all other training
Track your non-CUES training modules on this system
Add your proprietary chapter (s) of study material to any or all courses
Load your proprietary courses onto our website
Use our “curriculum developer” to create and track multiple curriculums for students with due dates
Determine exam taking specifications
Allow employees to print out certificates of achievement
Provide each employee with access to their unique curriculums
Offer more tools to check knowledge throughout the courses
Provide access to our unique information features
Update exams of frequently taken courses
Set up level two administrators to monitor a department/location
Check an employee transcript

Subscribers to CUES Online University also have access to Linked Free Courses. These resources consist of courses and publications which are provided on other Internet sites. Each site is reviewed and described with a table of contents. Our objective is to keep financial institution professionals up-to-date on quality training available on the Internet.

The Operational Links feature is a constantly-growing library of Web sites tailored to financial professionals. It is a tool for gathering information over the Internet. The Webliography is organized by subject to make finding the information you need easier. Each Web site listed is accompanied by a brief description of the site content and a link to the site. The links are consistently reviewed for reliability.

The Legal and Regulatory Center is a feature designed for the compliance officer, human resource professional, and those interested in new laws, regulations, and interpretations. The Center has links to sites that cover most of the employment, financial compliance, and safety and soundness laws and regulations that apply to financial institutions. Similar to the Webliography, the links are organized by the laws and regulations to which they relate.

The Weekly Regulatory Update is our newest feature which was developed in response to customer feedback. This feature provides a weekly update of the major releases from the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Credit Union Administration, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision.

Access to CUESU’s courses is through a secure user name and password. The user name and password can be purchased on a subscription basis. The price for a one-year subscription depends on the number of employees in your credit union. The prices are shown on the page "New User Walkthrough." The subscription provides unlimited access for employees at home or in the office. Each subscriber will receive a copy of the course catalog with a detailed table of contents for each course. Subscribers also receive one or more subscriptions to our newsletter, CUES Online University News and E*News our email newsletter.

As new courses are added and new course editions published, there will be no additional charge to subscribers.

You will note that CUES Online University courses are much less expensive than training materials available from other sources. The reasons are simple. We have no inventory financing and storage holding costs, no fulfillment costs, no shipping costs, no printing costs, minimal costs for creating new editions, and limited marketing costs.

CUES Online University is the partnership of the Credit Union Executives Society and Digital University, Inc.

The Credit Union Executives Society is a non-profit association in Madison, Wis. whose mission is to advance the professional development of credit union CEOs, senior management and (board) directors. It is managed by CEO Fred Johnson and a board of volunteer directors elected by CUES membership. CUES serves more than 6,000 members worldwide, under the corporate logo and tagline: "Your Professional Development Resource."

The association offers a wide array of professional development options for credit union executives and directors including: marketing and operations/technology conferences, forums, publications, seminar series, institutes, and this Web site.

CUES is especially well known among credit union executives for its professional development institute series. CUES' CEO Institutes are held at outstanding business school universities, including the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the University of Virginia. Its Executive Marketing, and Executive Operations institutes are held at a different location each year.

CUES also offers advanced director education opportunities through the CUES Directors Educational Forum and Directors Leadership Institute, held at the London Business School in London, England.

In addition, CUES works with credit union suppliers to develop educational products and information for CUES members. Many of those suppliers belong to the CUES Financial Suppliers Forum.

Digital University is the world's first Internet-based training and information organization for the financial service industries. Digital University first began offering Internet-based training and information services in 1997. Hundreds of financial institutions have use the companies services.

Digital University is the creation of Dr. Kenneth J. Thygerson. Thygerson has served as a business executive, academician, business and government consultant, and Presidential and Congressional advisor.

As a businessman, Thygerson served as President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, Imperial Corporation of America, and Western Capital Investment Corporation.

As an academician, Thygerson has authored or co-authored over 10 books and 50 articles for professional and trade journals. His most recent books include:

Product-line Profitability Evaluation Systems for Financial Depositors, published by Quorum Books in 1997

The Financial Institutions Internet Sourcebook, authored with Gary Evans, published by McGraw-Hill Inc. in 1997

Management of Financial Institutions, published by HarperCollinsPublishers in May 1995

Financial Markets and Institutions: A Managerial Approach, published by HarperCollinsPublishers in 1993

Controlling Corporate Legal Costs: Negotiation and ADR Techniques for Executives, published by Quorum Books in January 1994.

He has taught at numerous executive development programs and is a frequent speaker on topics in economics, finance, and housing.

Thygerson spent over 10 years as Director of the Division of Research and Economics and Chief Economist of the United States League of Savings Institutions. There he was responsible for managing the trade group's over 20 research professionals.

As a Presidential and Congressional advisor, Thygerson served as a member of President Ronald Reagan's Commission on Housing from 1981 to 1982 and as a Senior Advisor on the Reagan 1980 to 1981 transition team. Thygerson has testified in over twenty Congressional hearings in both the House and the Senate. He also served as an advisor to government officials in Latvia, Indonesia, and Mexico.