Building a Library of E-Learning Terms

Jul 03, 2018

Hey peeps, 

The community team has been working on a series called E-Learning ABCs. It's a glossary of terms, concepts, and words related to e-learning, training, and instructional design. You'll see some familiar and common terms such as ADDIE, Learning Management System (LMS), and SCORM. But this is just a beginning, there are many things not included in the glossary yet!

I'd love to know from the community what additional words, concepts, and terms you'd like to see covered in this list. Please let me know in the comments.

Thanks in advance helpful community peeps!

27 Replies
Steve Meikle

A really good point Nicole. 

A couple more that spring to mind for me ... assets / vector and raster images / kerning and leading (I am an old school graphic designer who still thinks these concepts are important).

How about concepts from layout as well?  Balance? symmetry vs asymmetry? negative space? the rule of thirds, avoiding floating?

I just hope it doesn't get weighed down with people justifying their existence through terms too....

Ray Cole

Some terms that cut right to the heart of our industry might include:

  • Infodump
  • Performance-oriented training
  • Awareness training
  • Bloom's Taxonomy
  • (Michael Allen's) CCAFs
  • Training climate (which I would define as non-training factors that can affect the ability of training to be successful. For example, people are trained to use a particular software tool, but are not given access to the software. Or people are trained to use a particular process, but the performance management system rewards them more for not using that process.)
  • (Carl Binder's) Six Boxes Model
  • Evidence-based practice
  • Practice-based evidence
  • Performance Support
  • Job Aid
  • Case Study
  • Context
  • Rubric
  • Facilitation
  • Deliberate Practice
  • Transfer (or Learning Transfer)
  • Ratio (Doug Lemov's term describing the ratio of work the student must do vs. work the instructor must do. In lecture-based training, the ratio is low as the instructor does most of the work. Higher ratios generally indicate better training designs that are more likely to have lasting impact.)

Cheers!

    -Ray

Ray Cole

I forgot to add:

  • Spaced practice
  • Massed practice
  • (Ebbinghaus's) Forgetting curve
  • Retrieval (as in retrieving from memory to help encode knowledge from short-term to long-term memory).
  • Short-term memory
  • Long-term memory
  • "Learning Style" (be sure to point out the lack of evidence for this popular concept)

Cheers!

    -Ray

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