The Time Has Come – eLearning!

A case for changing from e-Learning to eLearning.

Language is such a fluid thing. It’s constantly changing. It never stands still. In France, they have the Académie française that has the official authority on usages, vocabulary and grammar of the French language and to publish official dictionaries. These are basically a group of people who sit down and determine the use of words and how words change over time. We don’t have anything like that here in the United States. But the fact is, we have words that change over time—especially the ones that are used more and more frequently. For example, take email. Originally, it started out as e mail. Then it morphed into e-mail and now it’s changed into a “closed compound” word by eliminating the hyphen and becoming email.

Per The Chicago Manual of Style, 15^th edition, there is a “trend toward closed compounds.” They go on to say, “With frequent use, open or hyphenated compounds tend to become closed. …” Another example of this is “on-line” which has become, over time, “online.”

Apple takes this concept to a whole different level with their iAnything! They have their iPad, iPhone, iWatch and maybe tomorrow’s iLunchBox. They don’t hyphenate it. They imply high-tech with the use of a small case “i” in front of their products. We have already taken learning into high-tech and have been doing this for years and years. I’m not implying we should have iLearning; that will be held for Apple to fight for that one, I’m certain. But let’s update this overly-hyphenated word, eLearning, and update it for this millennium.

eLearning has been around long enough. Many have already switched to eLearning, like Lynda.com and eLearning Magazine. Meanwhile, there are those who use both and those who are stuck with the omni-present hyphen. I say it’s high time we move forward to eLearning. Enough time has passed; it’s time to put the hyphen to rest.

The train has left the station, so get on board. Besides, there’s also mLearning to contend with. But that will have to be for another day.