My organization is creating its first eLearning courses. Our time with SME's is very limited. The SME's have given us the text and we are creating the course. Does anyone have guidelines for creating a course glossary? For example, do we include all proper nouns etc..?
Any ideas?

Hi CMC -- Some general guidelines about course glossaries:

1) Include only terms that one could not find in a dictionary or shouldn't already know based on prerequisite skill/knowledge or context

2) Ensure that within the learning, you simply link the term to the definition with a pop-up. (Let the learner choose whether or not he/she needs to read the definition)

3) If your glossary is getting longer than the module itself, it's time to figure out why the course is so heavily laden with terms that need to be defined

Hope this is helpful.

I agree with Fanatic Facilitator. Some other things to consider:

If the course is linear and learners must go through the sections in order, link only the first occurrence of the word.

Avoid using the glossary to supply detailed background information. If you find yourself writing long paragraphs of "definitions," you need to provide more basic information in the course itself or reconsider who you're designing the course for.

If your tool uses HTML, consider putting the glossary in one file, with anchor tags for each entry. When someone clicks a linked word in the course, they'll see that entry in the popup window because the link will go to that anchor. At the same time, learners could also just browse the glossary, especially if you put a link to the glossary itself in the course navigation.

Thank you for your helpful responses. The authoring tool I use has a nice Glossary feature and my organization would like to take advantage of the functionality.

One last question, does anyone know if it is okay to use definitions from a printed source - with proper citation of course?