Outstanding guest authors complement with new concepts for possible market trends.

For two years, the partners in the ARIEL project "Analysing and Reporting the Implementation of Electronic Learning in Europe", which included universities and research institutions from five European countries, studied supply and the demand of the European market for eLearning in SMEs. "Will eLearning support European SMEs to be successful and to integrate into the European market?" was the question the ARIEL project wanted to address.

The first chapter of the book summarizes the findings and scenarios of the ARIEL project. The contributions follow the chronology of the project work, starting with monitoring activities and results of the first project year. Based on the monitoring activities, four contrasting scenarios were developed and evaluated.

The second part of the work deals with opportunitites and barriers to eLearning in SMEs. It is a summary of a panel discussion among Emma O'Brian from the University Limerick, Steffi Engbert University of Duisburg and owner of a micro-enterprise for eLearning solutions, and Dr. Claudio Cuneo, Italian business consultant. The other two participants were Jorge Costa David from the EU-commission DG enterprise and Michael Grosse from the European trade organisation EUROCOMMERCE.

In order to complete the outlook regarding the future of eLearning in SMEs, the editors invited some authors who have worked in the field of training and eLearning in SMEs for several years. Philippe Trouvé and and Elyes Bentabet give an overview of different types of national frameworks for training in SMEs in the European Union, within which a variety of practical approaches to the implementation of eLearning may take place.

As a first example, Graham Attwell stresses the importance of informal learning and proposes the development of communities of practices in SMEs supported by ICT. In another discussion, Timothy Hall and Emma O'Brian endeavour to improve the preparation of formal learning processes by facilitating training-needs analyses in SMEs.

The project presented by Anthony Busk implements eLearning in SMEs in co-operation with interested stakeholders, e.g. training providers and regional development authorities. And finally, Karsten D. Wolf outlines franchising as a promising business model for the diffusion of eLearning in SMEs.