LEARNING BURST: JARGON BUSTER

If you’re new to the eLearning world, you may feel like you’ve stumbled into a foreign land where everyone speaks a different language. Fear not, we’re here to guide you through the maze of terminology.

Asynchronous Learning: It’s like Netflix for education. You don’t have to worry about binging on a bunch of learning in one night, but you might want to stock up on some popcorn and soda just in case.

Synchronous Learning: Essentially, synchronous learning is a live online class where everyone attends together but from different digital locations. Where everyone pretends to look interested or pretends their “camera isn’t working”.

Learning Management System (LMS): A digital beast that eats up courses and spits out grades. It’s like a virtual school building where the hallways are always confusing.

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC): It’s like a concert where thousands show up, but nobody knows who’s actually paying attention. You could be learning quantum physics or watching cat videos in another tab.

Blended Learning: The educational smoothie. A little bit of in-person class, a dash of online learning - blend until smooth and hope for the best.

Instructional Design: It’s like being an architect but for courses, where your building blocks are videos, quizzes, and the occasional existential crisis about whether anyone’s learning anything.

Gamification: Turning learning into a video game, minus the fun of actually playing video games. Collect points, badges, and hopefully some knowledge.

Microlearning: Education in snack-size. Because who has the attention span for a full meal these days? When food analogies used to be all the rage.

Adaptive Learning: It’s like having a personal tutor who’s a robot. The robot figures out what you know and don’t know, then supposedly gets sneakily smarter as you learn, but essentially serves you up the same content in disguise.

Flipped Classroom: Students do homework in class and listen to lectures at home. It’s like telling your learners to eat their dessert first and veggies later.

SCORM: The rulebook for e-learning courses to play nicely together. It’s like the old VHS tapes and DVDs, in theory, they should just play in anyone’s player. Until they don’t.

Virtual Classroom: Where students and teachers meet in the matrix. Same as a regular classroom, but with more technical difficulties and unexpected cat appearances.

E-portfolio: A digital trophy case where students show off their greatest hits, including that PowerPoint that almost made sense.

Learning Pathway: It’s like a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book for education, except sometimes the choices are just “click next”.

M-Learning (Mobile Learning): Because why sit at a desk when you can learn about the French Revolution in line at Starbucks?

Webinar: A seminar where half the attendees are answering emails and the other half forgot they signed up.

xAPI (Experience API / Tin Can API): A way to track all the learning you do, like a fitness tracker but for your brain, except nothing really connects to it, just a few apps, but not Strava.

Learning Analytics: It’s like being watched by Big Brother, but for education. They know when you logged in, what you clicked, and maybe even what you ate for breakfast.

Instructional Technology: The art of using gadgets and gizmos to make learning slightly less painful.

Authoring Tools: The magical wands instructional designers wave to turn caffeine into courses.

Competency-Based Learning: Proving you know stuff not by time spent glued to your screen, but by actually knowing stuff. Revolutionary!

Kirkpatrick Model: The Hogwarts Sorting Hat of training effectiveness. It tells you whether your training is Gryffindor-great or more of a Slytherin-slip-up.