Australian universities have aggressively courted and created many partnerships with
universities in the greater Asian region in the last 10 years. A typical Australia university will
have between 10 and 20 partnerships with Asian Universities but over the last 2 years many have
pared back their offerings into these Asian destinations due to concerns about profitability. Whilst
the nature of the exchange between the universities can follow several models in almost all cases
an Australian academic is required to travel and deliver course material into an Asian destination.
This paper details the issues that one academic confronts in delivering a Masters level course into
a Beijing based university. The masters program that is the topic of this paper uses SAP hosting
centers, internal SAP servers for access to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and provides
ERP visiting experts teaching SAP content with a combination of off-shore delivery using face-toface
and on-line delivery. The issues that confront an academic delivering off-shore programs and
courses 9116 kilometers from home are explored as well as the day to day tribulations required of
the visiting lecturer.