Charles Schwab & Co., the investment company, says it's "creating a smarter breed of investor," but some online investors needed to learn the basics. "We've had people call our service centers and ask, 'What's a mutual fund, a stock, or a bond?'" says VP of interactive education Janet Lecuyer.

Offering live classes for 3.3 million online investors was impractical. So Schwab added a free Learning Center to its Web site, where anyone can take step-by-step programs on the basics.

Schwab hired DigitalThink Inc. to design the courses and help Schwab understand how people learn. "You can label a lot of Web content as educational, but does it really engage the learner?" Lecuyer says.

Online learning vendor VSI Communications Group Inc. has noticed that less-sophisticated users are coming online just as companies want to offer more-complicated services, says VSI CEO Dan Gallo.

VSI has sold 2.5 million desktop licenses to businesses for its Mentor program, which provides short, multimedia tutorials for just-in-time training on programs such as Lotus Notes and Web browsers. Consumer interest has just started to pick up: VSI recently agreed to have a large telecom company use Mentor to teach Internet subscribers how to use the Web and E-mail, and it agreed to build a tutorial system for a startup news and stock-trading site called StockTalkLive.com, which plans to launch by midyear.

Technology companies are also creating engaging teaching tools. Lawson Software Inc., an enterprise resource planning software vendor in Minneapolis, has spent the past year working with DigitalThink to turn all its training into "knowledge objects"-short chunks of information stored on a server that customers can access for answers to single questions or for the basics on a given topic.

Jamie Jackson, director of Lawson's Software University, says there's a demand for this training, adding, "We started to do this because our customers wanted to use our information to create their own training."