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.