In recent history, online learning was referred to as distance or remote learning. These terms are no longer concise enough to communicate how educators reach students or how students learn outside the traditional face-to-face classroom. Post-secondary educators are often combining online teaching modalities (both asynchronous and synchronous) with face-to-face learning creating new online learning modalities. As educators use technological advancements to customize online and face-to face learning experiences for students they have updated the terms used to describe online learning modalities that combine more than one teaching modality. Lack of consensus on the terms and/or the new definition was found between institutions.

Seeing the need for a standardization of terms, two not-for-profit organizations, the Canadian Digital Learning Research Association (CDLRA) and the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) collaborated to determine the terms educators on both sides of the border commonly used. Between 2022-23 they surveyed post-secondary educators nationally across the Canada and the US to determine the preferred terms used to describe online modalities. From the data sets they generated concise definitions of the updated terms now used to describe online learning and developed a standard for online learning terminology to be used cross nationally. This standard has been adopted at their partner institutions in Canada and the US (see Figure 2).