**1. Introduction**

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) assure economic growth in Europe. In the European Union 28 (EU28), in 2013 some 21.6 million SMEs employed 88.8 million people and generated 3.666 trillion in values added [1]. The financial crisis and the economic recession

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have hit SMEs hard in the EU28 and the economic conditions remain difficult. Many of these companies are micro enterprises, have few resources, and difficulties in facing technological, economic, and financial changes.

Generally, many SMEs are struggling to survive in an ongoing global recession and are often reluctant to release or pay for staff training. Research has highlighted the role of training and skills development on business success. However, in difficult times training budgets are often the first to be reduced or removed. This is often because owner/managers of SMEs do not have enough knowledge about the long-term value of training in sustaining competitive advantage and about suitable, efficient, and chip learning solutions.

E-Learning has tried to address issues of time and cost in SMEs, by allowing employees to access learning resources remotely. The learning material is easy to keep updated; the trainers can integrate multimedia content which facilitates understanding and motivate the partici‐ pants, but this form of learning is not used efficiently in SMEs. Some disadvantages of E-Learning could be its weakness on scalability at the infrastructure level; inefficient utilization of resources during the night and holidays; cost related to computer maintenance, installation, and technical support for individual software packages.

Cloud Computing offers many opportunities and can help companies improve their business and use technology more efficiently also for E-Learning.

Marston et al. [2] define Cloud Computing as "an information technology service model where computing services (both hardware and software) are delivered on-demand to customers over a network in a self-service fashion, independent of device and location."

Agility, elastic scalability, low costs are some benefits of using Cloud Computing; data can be moved smoothly without boundaries. Cloud platforms are an alternative to traditional computer centers. Cloud can be viewed as being Education Software as a Service. The learning resources could be accessed anywhere and anytime, costs for software installation and maintenance are reduced, SMEs can pay by subscription based on usage of learning resources, etc.

In addition to Cloud Computing, Scenario-based E-Learning introduces learners to real-life situations close to their business allowing them to gather skills or information for future use. There are many reasons why scenarios help to improve learners' engagement and motivation and to understand core concepts like the Cloud.

In this chapter, learning methods and the use of blended learning and particularly E-Learning in European SMEs are described in part 1. The advantages of using Cloud Computing in E-Learning including models of cloud architectures for E-Learning are presented in part 2 and Scenario-based E-Learning in part 3. In part 4, examples and conclusions are given.
