One of the big reasons is because of downsizing in the private and public sectors. One effect of downsizing is that many of the remaining jobs have been accelerated or compressed. Training departments, in particular, have been hit very severely. Yet the pressure on training departments to deliver more knowledge transfer for the people that remain is greater than ever.
Academia faces similar pressures, as well as a changing regulatory structure.
That's being examined by the Clinton administration in an effort to rescind it. So educational institutions as we know them are being pressured to expand their student base by engaging in distance learning practices. Perhaps it would help to provide a concrete example. One project that I remember you talking about was needing to train a several hundred person sales force in the benefits of a new software package that the company was rolling out. In that situation, the software was a very complex mainframe package designed to fix Year 2000 problems.