In all established learning events within the organizations, the courses offered by the learning networks provide high quality learning opportunities for the participants fortunate enough to attend them, but the number of places available within any given year is limited by budgets and other constraints. There is a need to greatly increase the learning opportunities and e-learning provides a powerful alternative to these courses. The second reason to move with the e-learning opportunities is to enhance quality and outcomes of the courses offered. As good as the other courses are, e-learning provides unique affordances for supporting learning that even best traditional face-to-face courses cannot match. These include:

• E-learning can be designed to support participant engagement in authentic learning tasks. For authentic learning to occur, learners must be engaged in a realistic task that provides opportunities for complex collaborative activities and the construction of enriched mental models of the constructs and procedures related to vaccine regulation, production, distribution, and storage.


• E-learning permits individualized learning in ways that traditional courses do not allow or only allow at higher costs. An integral component of state-of-the-art e-learning is enriched learning assessments that permit the learning interactions afforded to individual learners to be personalized.


• E-learning allows self-pacing of learning so that more experienced participants can complete courses in briefer periods and less experienced learners can spend the additional time they may require to accomplish the learning objectives of a course.


• E-learning enhances collaborative and cooperative learning, vital aspects of effective learning and professional development in the 21st Century.


• E-learning permits consistent delivery of the same learning opportunities to all participants, an important advantage in a corporate setting.


• E-learning can be designed to automate the processes involved in providing proof of completion of learning outcomes and award of certificates.


• When the costs of developing state-of-the-art e-learning courses are amortized across many participants, the overall costs to attain a given set of objectives can be reduced.


• Research has shown that average time to accomplish a given set of objectives can be reduced by 20-40 percent.