New types of documents are generated by emerging technologies to support various information needs. Researchers have pointed out that genre studies of new documents are needed for information management (Päivärinta, 1999; Beghtol, 2001). In this paper, we survey the genres of media objects used by six Web sites providing boating instruction in the U.S. The purpose of the analysis is to understand the usage of different media objects for e‐learning and potential management schemes of the media objects in e‐leaning systems.