For big brands, corporate training used to be basic. But in the age of Hamburger University, it’s become much more extensive.

The university started in Illinois in 1983 with a $40 million corporate investment. Today, it has 5,000 students a year using a 300-seat auditorium, 12 interactive team education rooms, and state-of-the-art training rooms -- all on a sprawling 130,000 square-foot campus.

And don’t forget the international campuses in Sydney, Munich, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Brazil.

This is McDonald’s Hamburger University and it’s a model, albeit changing, of corporate training in a branded world.

Recognized by the American Council on Education, students can even earn college credits at the McDonald’s (MCD) training facility. It’s all done through an intensive course load targeting different levels of McDonald’s management, including managers, mid-management, and executives.

While McDonald’s corporate campus is the largest, it wasn’t the first. Dunkin’ Donuts established Dunkin’ Donuts University in 1966 to serve the same purpose.

“The companies that do the best job of brand maintenance and training are the most successful franchisees. You’re letting someone use your brand. You need to be very careful to make sure the franchisee is doing their best to represent that brand,” says Mark Siebert, CEO of the iFranchise Group -- a consulting group that specializes in franchising and includes clients such as Ace Hardware, Bridgestone, McDonalds, and Massage Envy, a growing massage chain acquired last year by Veria Wellness Centers in a multi-million-dollar deal.

“What makes Hamburger University so special is it’s a full-blown campus,” he says.

It makes sense for large corporations to bottle their branding secrets and pass it around to their partners, but by the beginning of this decade, the Hamburger University model had been so streamlined and institutionalized that companies ranging from Walt Disney (DIS) to Federal Express (FDX) to Motorola (MOT) began offering seminars providing insight into their corporate culture for people not even affiliated with the brand -- an unthinkable concept considering how closely companies like McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts guard their own training secrets.

While the brand training model has become more important, today’s methods vary.

Borrowing from the overbearing school of brand integrity, Holiday Inn (IHG) has corporate representatives inspect each hotel twice a year. Using a less-vigilant online approach, Starbucks’ (SBUX) corporate training is relegated primarily to a thick manual, while Subway conducts classes at Subway University online.

Many of the country’s top companies, including General Electric (GE), Dell (DELL), and Intel (INTC), offer large-scale corporate universities, mostly outlining the companies’ core principles and important office protocols regarding sexual harassment and call-center etiquette.

But there’s a lot more to some of these universities than basic training.

Part of Dunkin’ Donuts’ curriculum involves a final exam in which students must bake 140 dozen donuts (that’s 1,680 donuts) in eight hours, from which six donuts are selected at random to see if they make the grade.

Meanwhile, 1-800-FLOWERS’ Floraversity employs an actors’ workshop to work with telecenter employees through videotaped role-playing sessions.

But the nucleus of Floraversity is the company’s series of “1-800-FLOWERS.com Legends” manuals, offering the company’s retailers a series of random, hypothetical situations and the best ways to resolve them.

Want to send roses to an anonymous cocktail waitress at an airport bar? The manual helps employees do that.

While their methods have increasingly moved online, many brands now boast the most extensive situational training imaginable -- even if on the surface it looks like it’s just about flipping burgers.