With a worldwide workforce of more than 11,000, including military bases with no access to its intranet, government contractor L-3 Communications Vertex Aero-space L.L.C. needed to communicate benefits more efficiently. It also wanted to know if employees actually looked at the information.

Beginning with open enrollment last October, Madison, Miss.-based L-3 Vertex rolled out a password-protected Internet site, available to roughly 90% of its workers. Employees can log on wherever they are and download the benefits plan, including a PowerPoint presentation explaining the benefits. The company, in turn, tracks page views and downloads.

"We have changes in our benefits, some years more subtle than others, but we usually have changes every year," said Robert James, the company's vp of human resources. "The PowerPoint with the voice-over allowed us to get the communication out on those changes without having to send a rep to every site."

Electronic learning has gained popularity among U.S. companies. On average, 30% to 35% of the information delivered in most companies today is electronic, said Edward Trolley, vp of learning outsourcing at ACS Learning Services in Chicago. That's up from 20% to 22% four to five years ago, he said.

Benefits, and communication about them, are important to employers and employees alike, according to Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.'s Sixth Annual Employee Benefits Trends Study. For employers, employee retention was the top objective of offering benefits. For employees, health benefits ranked behind salary, and retirement benefits tied for the third-highest factor in retention and workplace loyalty, according to the April study.

In its simplest form, e-learning is conducted via e-mail, CDs and DVDs. More sophisticated formats include videos and Web conferences. Using online or other electronic means to train employees is convenient because workers can do it on their own schedule. It eliminates the need to travel and allows employers to deliver a consistent message, Mr. Trolley said.

"So if I've got an hour right now on a four-hour training program, I can do an hour, I can log off, I can come back tomorrow, next week, next month, and start up again where I was," Mr. Trolley said. "And if I don't remember what I did in the first hour, I can go back and do it again, and then when it's all done...I can go back and do a refresher."

There's a financial imperative as well. With e-learning, there's no need to book a space and send an instructor. After the upfront investment to create an electronic program, it can be tweaked with little expense, Mr. Trolley said.

By minimizing printing and mailing costs, L-3 Vertex expects to save thousands a year. For those that prefer paper, the company will distribute CDs from which employees can print out copies of enrollment materials.

Electronic learning is still rather new to the benefits arena, so its usage is "on the low end" compared with other company departments, Mr. Trolley added.

But Donald R. Sanford, managing director in the St. Louis office of Buck Consultants L.L.C., expects increased demand for sophisticated communication tools as many employers move to consumer-driven health care plans

"The next frontier for managing costs is engagement and education," Mr. Sanford said. "By educating employees and engaging them in the process, they can better take charge of their own health and lifestyle and have a positive long-term impact on health care costs."

However, it is unclear if e-learning achieves better results than traditional teaching methods.

In a sweeping review of the literature, U.K. researchers at the University of Sussex found "weak, positive but not yet compelling evidence of the effectiveness" of e-learning in higher education, medical education and the workplace. In the workplace, easy-to-use technology positively affected learners' satisfaction with e-learning, and flexibility in when and where the learning takes place influenced the quality of the experience.

Even as the use of e-learning is growing, Nenette Kress, senior vp and national practice leader for communications at Segal Co. in New York, sees a resurgence of face-to-face meetings and health fairs.

As employees are forced to make more decisions about their health and retirement, they want every piece of information they can get, Ms. Kress said.

"They also want to be in a place where they can perhaps hear somebody else's questions that they themselves might not have thought of." It's not a backlash against technology, Ms. Kress said. "I just think that people need both."

For L-3 Vertex, feedback from its benefits e-learning effort found that employees on average stayed for only one-third to one-half of the PowerPoint presentation. So this year it will put all the important changes at the beginning.

"People, we found out, are in such a hurry when they go to the Internet, they want a data dump upfront," Mr. James said.

Maureen Robbins, vp of benefits at Realogy Corp. in Parsippany, N.J., sees great potential in electronic benefits communication. Beginning with last October's open enrollment, the real estate services company began doing all of its benefits communication electronically for a global workforce of 13,000.

Looking ahead to the next open enrollment, Ms. Robbins said she hopes to record and post a video on benefits changes for the next year. Eventually, she would like to have an entire video library to help employees navigate their benefits, including mental, dental and disability.

"When you go to your carriers, they'll say, 'You know what? We have a great Web site, but your employees aren't using it,"' Ms. Robbins said. "Well, that's because they're not aware of it, so we need to educate more on what's out there, what's available to make them better consumers."

That could be as simple as creating a video demonstration for employees to click on, she said.