Re: Glossary functions and features in elearning

[Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>]

Brad,

I would strongly recommend that you leave all glossed words undecorated 
and uncolored. In other words, they should look just like the 
surrounding text. I say this because, from your description, passages 
would start to be heavily populated with links; and once a reader knows 
the word, visible links are merely distractions. They do not aid 
comprehension.

Okay, so if you can't determine which words are glossed by looking at 
them, what do you do? Some thoughts:

The author (not the software) can decide to bold words to cue the reader 
about the glossary entry. Typically an author would do this on the first 
occurrence (or perhaps the first occurrence in each unit, if the units 
can be accessed independently).

Readers should be instructed, once, that to learn about any unfamiliar 
term in the text, they should float the mouse over the word (or, 
perhaps, click the word).

On mouseover, you could show a tooltip (or Title/Alt text, whatever you 
want to call it, but you know what I mean). This might be either the 
definition itself (if it is short enough), or an instruction to click 
the word for a full definition.

I think doing it this way would keep it unobtrusive but easily available.

My two cents.

Dick

Brad Jensen wrote: