3. Create a Glossary

Casey Shew Updated by Casey Shew

Overview

An eCornell glossary is an alphabetized list of all the terms defined by faculty within their teaching in the course. It's not:

  • Terms we think should have been included but weren't
  • Terms that also might be of interest to this audience
  • Terms that were not defined within the course, but we wish had been, so we go out to google and find our own definitions on wikipedia. That's a definite no-no. Adding in third party content we find online that that anybody could find online as easily as we can: that's not Cornell teaching.
If there's a term that the professor uses in the teaching but fails to define, an IDA can flag that. It's the ID's job to then ask the professor or course author: You used this term in your teaching but didn't define it, should we include a definition?

-If the faculty author says yes, we should include a definition, then they need to write the definition and provide it to us as source content, and it should go not only in the glossary but also be worked into the course text, say, on the Watch page where it's first used.
- If the faculty author says: No, for this audience, they should already be very familiar with that term, then it doesn't belong in the glossary.

How to Create a Glossary

Glossaries are a standard tool available for students in all eCornell not-for-credit courses. To develop a glossary for a course, follow the steps below.

  1. Open a new/blank Google Document or use the glossary template in this ABC101 folder.
  2. Use the following naming convention for the glossary file: "coursenumber_glossary". Example: SHA561_glossary
  3. Open the artboard collab document to pull important terms for the glossary.
For more about the artboard collab document, visit the Help Docs article here.
  1. Add terms in alphabetical order in the document, using the artboard collab document as the main source of information.
You can also review the videos to help get a better understanding of the content, along with the collab document.
  1. Add definitions to each term using the collab documentation (and videos).
  2. Once all terms and definitions have been added to the glossary document, send the document to the ID to review.
Remember that terms appear in sentence case. An exception to this standard is acronyms, whose component parts remain capitalized in the definition. For example, "RADAR is an acronym for Radio Detection and Ranging."
  1. Once the ID has finalized the glossary with the faculty, they will send the document to CSG for stylizing, @mentioning Yumi Suh and the graphic designer, if known, in that task.
  2. After CSG has provided the finalized document, embed the glossary in the Course Resources module. For instructions on how to embed documents in Canvas, refer to this article.

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3. Glossary - Wrike Task Definitions

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