As someone who’s been teaching in the virtual space since nearly the beginning of fully online (over the internet) courses, my personal inclination towards the “anytime, anywhere” that’s so often held up as a key feature of the approach runs deep with me. I love the fact that I can teach my courses very early in the morning with my first cup of coffee, or out on the patio on a lovely summer evening. I love the fact that I rarely have to drive to a campus through traffic, find parking, figure out lunch on the run, etc., etc. I love the fact that I rarely have to be on the spot or in the limelight, and that I can generally be very thoughtful with the interactions I have with my students. An, quite frankly, I love that I can teach in shorts Summer or a sweatshirt in the Winter. All of those features are near and dear to my hear; however, I do sometimes miss the excitement of being in front of as live group and hammering out great academic ideas on the fly.

With that all having been said, I am currently teaching a college-level writing course online, but the institution requires weekly live seminars to lecture on the topic of the week and answer question in real time. Although I found myself dreading the sessions initially, the rush of live performance came right back to me, and I enjoyed the real-time interaction with the students very much. Here at Champions, all of our online math tutoring occurs in real-time also, and the feedback from the kids has been overwhelmingly positive with regards to the real connection they make with the instructor.

So, I suppose that my own lesson here is that although “anytime, anywhere” is a wonderful personal arrangement, the types of interactions that can occur in real time can be very meaningful and substantive, and can really enhance the overall educational experience.

There are lots of benefits to getting our kids online–either in wholly online courses or for fun events to supplement their in-class learning experiences. Some of the benefits that are often touted for engaging our kids in these types of experiences include gaining good writing approaches, learning great computer skills, immersive learning experiences in environments that cater to different learning styles, along with the incredible level of self-motivation that’s needed to just get through an electronic learning experience.

With that all said, though, there’s another aspect to computer-based distance learning that’s sometimes overlooked, but is a real benefit, and that’s just in the inherent access to all the information available on the WWW. Students in an art course can take a virtual guided tour of the Louvre Museum or the Met, they can take a virtual walk along the Great Wall of China, or they can even head to Mars.

The instructor guided virtual field trip allows for kids from anywhere to be able to see amazing sites all over the world, and interact with sites and cultures from worlds away. And, with the advent of chat and video-conferencing software, one can even bring in a virtual speaker (i.e. an expert in a field) to guide them through their fun adventures.

I believe that with the numbers of kids today being driven to online solutions to supplement, replace or enhance their in-school and out-of school activities, it’s important that we all get to a place where we can have a common language and understand what’s really being asked of or children and students.

Interestingly, I’ve been involved in eLearning for so long, I just assume that everyone speaks the same language as I do, including all the acronyms that are involved in the language of the trade. As I review it, the list of acronyms is a long one just to scrape the surface, you have: LMS, LCMS, CMS, SCORM, LAN, SLA, RLO, IDC, CBT, ISTE, SME, and many more. Although most of these abbreviations really wouldn’t mean much to someone who’s not engaged in the conversation every day, I think that with the rapid growth of the eLearning industry, quite literally, everyone should at least know what an LMS is.

In general terms, an LMS (Learning Management System) is a software application either hosted by a company who develops and/or maintains the site in a SaaS (software as a service) relationship with the end users (normally an institution of learning or a corporation), or it can be hosted on-site by the institution or corporation itself with some sort of licensing fee. An LMS creates a portal site to host eLearning activities and normally includes some sort of registration mechanism, and areas for courses and other learning or social events. It normally gives instructors (or, more generally, course developers) some sort of an interface to post learning-based content, questions for discussion, and assessments of various kinds. There’s generally a variety of asynchronous (not in “real time”) and synchronous (in “real time”) communication tools available to allow teachers and learners to interact with each other, ranging from threaded discussions to chat, video and whiteboards.

In less technical terms, though, the LMS has evolved over time to provide teachers a wide range of tools to replicate or recreate the learning experience that happens in the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom. There are numerous methods of sharing, discussing and testing on the acquisition of information.

Anyway, with that all said, my plan over the next few weeks (or months if this conversation grows) is to continue to post quick blog posts to try to speak to some of the basic online terminology; so, if you’ve heard any terms or acronyms from the eLearning or Web 2.0 space that you’d like to hear defined in “plain English,” please feel free to post a comment to this blog, and I’ll try to accommodate as best I can.