What are Common eLearning Terms?
Like every niche industry, eLearning has its own vocabulary. It’s easy enough to pick up the lingo if you keep your ears perked up. But, in an effort to ease the learning curve, here’s a collection of common eLearning terms.
Blended learning This is a combination of digital and real-world educational content. Basically, a course that has both in-person training and supplemental material online.
Microlearning: Microlearning encompasses quick and easy-to-digest educational content. It’s usually video that’s 90 seconds or less.
Gamification: The use of gaming techniques drives engagement with learning content. This doesn’t mean installing “NBA Jam” on your LMS, but you can gamify the system by adding points or badges to the system. And yes, we agree that “NBA Jam” is a classic.
Informal Learning: Research shows that traditional classroom learning accounts for only 10% of what you learn. The other 90% comes from informal learning. It’s also called social learning, and is done through real-world experience and talking with others.
LMS: Learning management system. It’s an online tool that efficiently manages employee training, development and engagement.
Responsive Design: responsive design refers to the way a website’s layout and content rearranges to fit the screen of whichever device a user chooses. It’s important because a site with mobile responsiveness can be easily accessed on any device.
Engagement: Engagement is how involved your learners are with your LMS. It’s important because if a learner is actively engaged with an LMS, they’ll use it more often and retain more information.
Reporting: Your LMS tracks learners as they use the system. A report shows you those analytics. Unrelated to journalism.
Integrations: When things talk to other things, we call this integration. It’s when two pieces of software work together to ease the administrative burden and improve user experience.
Instructor-Led Training: This is a fancy term for what is mostly traditional education. Instructor-led training is when learning material is presented in person by a teacher or expert.
SCORM: Sharable Object Reference Model. It’s a file format—a way to package online training material. SCORM is a great way to share content between systems, because almost every LMS is SCORM-compliant.
