Electronically supported learning has increasingly been introduced and accepted into the academic community over recent decades, and a variety of new digital learning tools have been developed to serve students both for distance education and on-campus blended learning. To serve our distance education nursing students, we recently developed unique rich media e-compendiums, based on a combination of PDF and Flash technologies, as a substitute for on-campus lectures. Our e-compendiums are also available for our on-campus students as a supplement to their other learning tools (e.g., lectures, textbooks and podcasts). The aim of this study was to explore students' perceptions of the e-compendiums as a learning tool compared with the other e-learning tools and more traditional tools used in a first-semester course. The study had a descriptive quantitative design and the data were collected by means of a questionnaire developed for this study. We found that a clear majority of the students scored the e-compendiums as a better learning tool than lectures, multiple-choice questions, podcasts and textbooks. Our results indicate that rich media e-compendiums were perceived as better learning tools than both traditional learning tools and other electronically supported learning tools.