Ireland was thrust to the fore of the global electronic learning industry this week when 300 international industry delegates gathered in Dublin's Burlington Hotel for Europe's first e-learning seminar.

According to the host, Mr Elliott Masie, founder of US technology and learning think-tank, the Masie Center, Ireland was a natural choice to stage the event because of its early role in the development of e-learning.

In recognition of the Government's role in driving the e-learning phenomenon, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, was presented with the Masie Center's "e-Learning Pioneer Award 2000".

Presenting the award, Mr Masie said: "Ireland has birthed many of the key companies that have grown into international leaders in the learning component of the Digital Age.

It has become the world's leading producer of online learning content for IT and is building both the technologies and skills to advance the vision of learning anywhere, anytime."

Two Irish-founded companies, Smartforce and WBT Systems, which are at the forefront of the e-learning market, were the main sponsors of the Dublin event.

E-learning is an exploding market, and recent figures from International Data Corporation (IDC) estimate the annual market value, including Internet and intranet courses, will grow from $4 billion (€4.21 billion) to $15 billion worldwide in the four years end 2002.

E-learning is described as the use of networking technology - primarily the Internet - to design, deliver and support learning for the end user.

As companies become more global, time and location constraints have made employing only instructor-led, classroom-based training less feasible. Corporate Internet-based learning is the biggest growth area within the e-learning sector.

This week's event was about assessing the state of the e-learning market, particularly in Europe, and addressing some of the major issues facing the industry.

A panel discussion featured senior representatives from the world's biggest e-learning companies, including Click2Learn, Smartforce, IBM e-Learning, NetG, WBT Systems and HP Education Services. All of the speakers acknowledged considerable recent growth in the European market - it now accounts for 10 per cent of Click2Learn's revenues and 55 per cent of WBT's revenues.

While Nordic countries have been very quick to adopt e-learning, Mr Chris Cottam, general manager for Europe of HP Education Services, says many companies have previously just engaged in experimental pilot work and people are only ready to implement completely integrated learning programmes now.

On the business model side, flexible pricing and chargeback programmes are proving very popular. The recent US trend, where e-learning companies are offering training courses on an outsourced - or application service provider - basis is also appealing to organisations which simply want to lease the necessary software and have it continuously updated remotely.

Time to market emerged as the biggest driver for organisations embracing e-learning for their employees. The average training department can take up to 18 weeks to develop a training course; e-learning software vendors can dramatically reduce this. Mr Richard Oakes, chief executive officer of Click2Learn, said his company could deploy customised courses in 10 days.

Where it was previously widely held that English would serve as the base language for learning applications, Mr Greg Priest, president and chief operating officer of Smartforce, says this is no longer the case.

E-learning is also being recognised as a core business element, with a lot of organisations forming cross-functional committees to investigate how it can best be deployed.

All of the panel attendees acknowledged the progress of SCORM - a US military driven movement to encourage e-learning vendors to standardise their products for users.

Concerns were expressed that if a company invested large amounts in its e-learning software and the vendor went out of business the company might have to go and start all over again with a new vendor. Pressure is being exerted by SCORM to ensure learning modules can inter-operate where necessary.

All of the panellists agreed the customer market was still very unclear about what it wanted when it came to implementing an e-learning strategy. More commitment needed to be given at senior level to implement a cross-company strategy, which had a clearly-defined learning objective tied to the business's goals.

Despite the rate of growth of the e-learning industry, the learner experience is still found lacking. Language and bandwidth issues are proving critical here.

All agreed the industry would be greatly helped by the arrival of audio and video-streaming technologies which would allow for more meaningful "synchronous" training where students and tutors interacted in real time through virtual online seminars.