While e-education is getting hotter all the time for some types of adult learners, docs still don’t like to get their continuing medical education online, according to the second annual Pri-Med CME Insight Survey. Even with a 25 percent growth in e-CME this year among primary care physicians, “eCME is the preferred learning channel for only one physician in ten.” But Pri-Med thinks this will continue to be a growth area. From a press release:

“By a wide margin, medical meetings remain the preferred source for continuing medical education among physicians,” said Anne Goodrich, research director of the Pri-Med Institute. “While eCME today accounts for only 10% of all CME credits earned by primary care physicians, it is clearly an educational channel that is beginning to reach a broader audience,” she said.

The 2004 Pri-Med CME Insight survey of primary care physicians throughout the US found that live educational forums remain the preferred source of CME by a margin of four-to-one, followed by enduring materials, professional journals and eCME respectively. Currently, the least popular learning method is hospital grand rounds.

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Just think, one of these days you won’t have to spend all that cash flying in your keynoters first class—-according to this article from TRNmag.com, teleportation—-like Star Trek transporters—-may be closer to becoming a reality than you might think. It would quite literally turn the meetings world upside down, inside out, and sideways-—no more need for airlines, and people could teleport home each night instead of staying in a hotel. I can’t even imagine all the implications…but despite recent advances, it’s still pretty far down the road.

And I guess that acceptance, even once it’s perfected and found to be as safe as any other type of travel, would be a long time coming. Or maybe not. While the idea of destroying matter (your body!) to recreate it somewhere else has always given me the heebie-jeebies (remember that Star Trek episode where Kirk was split into two beings, one good and one evil?), I wouldn’t mind teleporting myself to Bora Bora once they get the kinks worked out.

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A relatively shocking (I thought) study by Arial Software on how organizations are doing in complying with the CAN-SPAM Act found that if you subscribe to 100 e-mail newsletters:

-Thirty-six will never send you anything.
-From the companies that actually send e-mails, you will receive around 77 e-mails per month.
-Almost no companies will outright spam you (0.4%).
-Of the e-mails you receive, 33 will have an unsubscribe link, and 31 of those will actually work.
-Thirty-one will have no unsubscribe link at all, and will keep sending you e-mails ad infinitum. This e-mail volume will amount to around 37 e-mails a month.
-Two companies will keep sending you e-mails even after you unsubscribe (1.8%)

Out of the 1,057 companies it studied, only 66 did everything right. Check the list on p. 7 to see if your organization is one of them. Or look at the much longer list at the end of those who didn’t make the grade. If yours is on there, time to send an (unsolicited) e-mail of your own to your online marketing folks!

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If you’re an MPI member, you now can get Corbin Ball’s Technology Guide for Meeting Professionals for free. The 1,200-product database is a must-have for tech-savvy planners, and you gotta admit, the price is right. To get your copy, visit mpifoundation.org.

The latest evidence of the commoditization of the hotel industry: Groople.com, a new online retail marketplace designed for group travel, according to a press release dated today.

While it bills itself as “the online travel industry’s most advanced technology for leisure groups,” it’s just one more sign that hotel rooms are all about rates, not value.

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Next time you’re traveling and want to know where you can go to get free Wi-Fi, check out wififreespot.com, which lets you search for the best open-to-the-public spots in all 50 U.S. states, plus a few other countries. It also has a hotel page, so you can see if your next meeting hotel offers Wi-Fi. Pretty cool, huh?

Thanks to Corbin Ball’sTechTalk e-newsletter for this nugget.

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While they’ve been working together unofficially for years, now three of the industry’s favorite meetings tech gurus–Corbin Ball, CMP, Rodman Marymor, CMP, and Jeff Rasco, CMP, have teamed up to steer one big new tech consulting enterprise called www.tech3partners.com.

Corbin, who’s been our technology columnist for light years, will still keep his old job of President and Founder of Corbin Ball Associates, Bellingham, Wash. Jeff’s been teaching us all about technology for 20 years and now, in addition to the new company, he continues to lead at interactive registration service provider Attendee Management, Inc. in Wimberley, Texas. Rodman, who heads up, Cardinal Communications of Berkeley, Calif., stole my heart when he created the Meeting Industry Mall nine years ago, which later spawned the MIMlist listserv I mention so much here, now owned by another publishing company.

“If two heads are better than one, then T3P has cubed the equation,” said Rasco in a press release. “We hope to bring not only technology expertise, but combined experience spanning three quarters of a century on both sides of the industry.”

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Forget the designer shampoo and in-room coffee pots: What today’s business traveler most wants is wireless Internet access, according to this article from hotel-online.

“About 6,000 hotels around the world now provide Wi-Fi access, according to Pyramid Research, a Cambridge, Mass.-based research firm. By 2007, the number will grow to 25,000, said Anshu Dua, a senior analyst at Pyramid.”

And here I am lugging a laptop that can’t connect without the good ole wires…and I totally disagree about the in-room coffee pots, which I can’t believe we lived without for so long.

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If you’ve been waiting until broadband usage hits the mainstream of your meeting attendees before jazzing up your meeting Web site, chances are you can go ahead now. According to this article in Telephony Online, “Broadband penetration in the U.S. reached 47.87% of all active Internet home users in April and the penetration is trending upwards quickly, according to new market data.” So chances are that at least half of your attendees are stuck with dial-up anymore.

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I’ve spoken with a number of planners who are frustrated with their inability to inject what has been proven to have results into their meetings–namely, interactivity, case studies, and multiple formats to fit different meetings needs of the various participants.

While your board, your boss, or even your attendees might balk at doing something other than the usual talking-head Powerpoint lecture, why not put today’s big “multipurposing” trend–repackaging live activities and putting them up on the Web–to a better use by slipping in some of the interactive activities that do result in behavior change? After all, a recent study of physicians and online continuing medical education found that online interactivity is welcomed by participants with open minds instead of pushed away with cold, sweaty hands, as is all too often the case when live meetings try to get interactive.

Sure, it can take a little more time and money to create an interactive online activity, rather than just slapping a Powerpoint presentation up on your Web site. But, as Linda Casebeer, PhD, principal investigator of the online CME study, says, “You may multipurpose, but it doesn’t serve any purpose if you’re just changing the media, not the way the message is presented.”

Give it a try, just once, then measure the results. I think you might be pleased to see how effective a little online interactivity can be in changing your attendees’ behavior. And if you already are doing this, please let me know how it’s going!

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