Suspicions are growing that the much trumpeted e-learning revolution, which governments hope will equip workers for the 21st-century digital economy, is turning out to be a damp squib.
A forthcoming survey shows that less than a third of organisations are using e-learning for staff training and the majority of these are doing so sparingly.
The recent closure of one of the UK's e-learning market leaders, Xebec McGraw-Hill, adds further weight to the argument that learning via electronic technology is not the elixir that many have boasted - or at least not for a long time yet.
Even among those training managers using e-learning, half of them spend only a tenth of their budget on it, according to the annual training and development survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).
Over half of those who currently use it feel that e-learning has been over-hyped by vendors. A similar proportion believe that e-learning provides the possibility of wasting a lot of money. Less than a quarter believe e-learning to be the most important development in training in a lifetime.
"What we've had is a lot of over-selling and hype of e-learning and so far the whole debate has been driven by the suppliers and vendors of e-learning," says Martyn Sloman, the CIPD's professional adviser for learning, training and development, and author of the book The E-Learning Revolution. "It's been a debate about technology and they've tried to seduce training managers with the technology."
The CIPD survey echoes a recent large-scale review by the American Society for Training and Development, which shows that e-learning in the US is stubbornly refusing to grow against other learning and training methods.
It simply isn't realising the predictions made by leading-edge American companies that by 2003 it would occupy more than 20% of training time, Sloman says.
In December, the US publishing giant McGraw-Hill decided to close Xebec McGraw-Hill, the UK arm of its "lifetime learning" division, whose whole operation was devoted to supplying and designing e-learning.
The US parent company forbade announcement of the closure of the UK operation near Stroud, Gloucestershire, with a loss of more than 100 jobs, and it slipped past unnoticed by the national media, said a former spokesman.
But the aftershock was felt in the Department for Education and Skills. Xebec was one of three training providers contracted to provide online courses for the department's own staff via its internal intranet.
The CIPD survey canvasses training managers from 502 UK organisations with more than 25 employees. Only 30.5% - 153 respondents - say they used e-learning for any group of employees within their establishments.
Only 6% of those using e-learning use it "a lot of the time" in training while almost 70% use it "a little". Even in financial services, where almost all employees have basic IT skills, over 70% of training managers use it only "a little".
Training managers most frequently use e-learning for teaching information technology staff. Then come the professional, clerical/ administrative and technical staff. About 40% of respondents use e-learning for them. It is less frequently used for managers, especially senior managers, and rarely used for manual employees.
Sloman says: "E-learning will eventually become a powerful new tool which will transform learning in organisations . . . it's going to happen but more slowly than people are predicting."