During our recent website rebuild, everything ground to a halt while we argued about the spelling of e-learning/eLearning. Is it spelt with or without the hyphen? Tempers got heated. Blood was nearly drawn.
We create it, so you’d think we’d know how to spell it. Embarrassingly a quick check of our old website showed wild inconsistency. Reassuringly a look at our main competitors’ websites showed they’re no better. Even our industry professional bodies, the US based E-learning Guild and the UK centric Elearning Network are pick-and-mix. So it wasn’t just us that could not decide.
One of the briefs for the new website was to pick one spelling and stick with it. Menacingly, there was a threat to the developers to ‘make sure you pick the right one’. Research was clearly required. Our company has a phrase when we’re stuck: J-F-G-I. The ‘J’, ‘G’ and ‘I’ stand for ‘Just’, ‘Google’ and ‘It’. I’ll leave the ‘F’ to your imagination.
So the first point of call was Google Trends. At first glance this showed that ‘e-learning’ with a hyphen is the most common typed variation in search engines in the UK. We have a winner! No, hold on… A closer look shows this only stands when looking cumulatively from 2004. If you use only more recent data, say since 2010, ‘eLearning’ no hyphen has the majority. The size of the majority grows throughout 2011, 2012 and 2013. It has the kind of momentum that wont be reversed. Now we have a winner.
In many ways this mirrors the debate we had around 20 years ago over how to spell email. Back then we used to type ‘e-mail’, but over time that hyphen got dumped. History repeats itself, so the same trend can be seen for e-commerce, e-business and, yes, eventually e-learning.
We’re actually not the first people to mull over this great issue of our time in learning technology. There is a great blogpost which is in violent agreement with our findings and annoyingly beat us to the punchline. So we’re sold. eLearning it is. End of debate. Almost. Work has now ground to a halt whilst we argue whether it is eLearning or elearning? Capital ‘L’ or not? But we’ll leave that one for another day.
Article by Guy McEvoy, MD Guykat Solutions, research by Natalie Jensen