I've been working with Microsoft's eLearning packages on and off for a few months now. The Collection 5160 covers 7 Courses considered as part of a 'Core Development' skill set. In a sense, I find these courses useful as a starting point, but they really only serve to whet the appetite for more information. Anyway I've always found that reading around a subject is necessary for reinforcement and as a matter of course I've done some googling as well as referring to my Safari bookshelf and MSDN. Writing some console applications and getting them working really helps cement the ideas in place and are also good for later referral.

For example, last night I was working on delegates and events. I worked through the eLearning material but found some of the examples either too brief or simply error-strewn and poorly explained. A quick search on EventArgs on my Safari bookshelf and some really useful examples are described in Donis Marshall's C# book and some advanced stuff to get to grips with in Bill Wagner's Effective C#. This morning I've quickly followed up on the eLearning environment's online forums, however not a lot of peer review goes on here and the moderators are non-existent bar the obligatory 1st post explaining how happy they are to help!

In summary, my overall approach to learning new technologies is based on knowing that passing the exam is not really going to be the end of the road. Especially with v3.0 and v3.5 to learn on top. There is no substitute for really understanding your stuff. Microsoft eLearning could do with putting this approach into practice.