Today, the term e-learning is widely used in a variety of contexts. Many of us are familiar with concepts like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), such as those provided by Coursera, Udacity, edX or MIT OpenCourseWare; Content- or Learning-Management Systems (CMSs, LMSs), like Moodle or Blackboard; Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), like EMBER; problem and tutorial portals, such as Rosalind and Train online; repositories for uploading and hosting Educational Resources (ERs), such as that

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... vided by GOBLET; ER aggregators that harvest and disseminate training information, such as TeSS; and so on. Resources like these are seamlessly discussed under the umbrella term 'e-learning'; however, they are heterogeneous and do not mean the same thing from user, developer, trainer or content-provider perspectives. Confusion can therefore arise if those using the term generically have not grasped each other's specific meanings. In the context of ELIXIR, this situation came to the fore in preparations for the EXCELERATE project, whose training programme (WP11) includes an explicit e-learning subtask (11.1.3) as part of the commitment to build an ELIXIR training infrastructure. The ultimate deliverable of the subtask is to develop an ELIXIR e-learning policy and deploy e-learning platform(s) at the ELIXIR level. But what does an 'e-learning platform for ELIXIR' mean? Is it an instance of a MOOC platform, a customised LMS, a bespoke VLE, an ER repository, an aggregator, or something else? Clarification of this question was important, because each of the possible answers has very different implementation and resource requirements. To try to address this question, and to facilitate communication both within ELIXIR, and between the ELIXIR and GOBLET trainer communities, an initial workshop – Defining an e-learning lingua franca – was held in Ljubljana (SI), 15-17 September 20 [...]