E-learning has become a very big business, as this growth occurs, however, a realisation is taking place, the big savings in travel and instructor cost are largely over. It is no longer enough to put our content on the web to save money and reach more people.

Corporations are flooded with electronic content. Many workers complain that they do not have the time to take hours and hours of online training. In e-learning there is no coffee, no donuts and no fellow students to chat with while you get away from work.

Many e-learning programs do fail. There are many reasons for this failure. One of the biggest problems is the paradigm itself. Workers today are busy doing their jobs, reading email and going to meetings. Unlike traditional training, e-learning is very easy to opt out. There is no getting away from the office to join an e-learning course. There is no class to chat with. It is very easy to disengage.

Even worse, Internet based content is often boring, slow and buggy. Many off the shelf courses are nothing more than pages of text with few colourful graphics. We are asking people to squeeze this activity into an already overcrowded day of work, meetings, email, family obligations and commuting.

Blended learning solves these problems. How do you create the right blend? There are some basic guidelines but the right blend depends on many criteria, these include business strategy, program type, audience, budget, recourses, content stability, content duration and technology infrastructure available. The other challenge in defining the blend is deciding what media types to use.