Glossary of Common Terms

A Licensing Board is the credentialing body that is responsible for defining managing the licensure standards for a given professional license. The Board is responsible for defining what it means to be "competent" in that scope of practice and for ensuring that all practitioners adhere to the licensure requirements.

Credentials are issued by a third party to an individual (or organization) as proof of that person's qualification or competence in a defined subject or domain. Credentials indicate that a professional has obtained a baseline level of education or has demonstrated some baseline level of knowledge or competence at a skill. 

The defined period of time during which a credential is valid. (Some programs have separate cycle dates for the "allowed to practice" period and the "allowed to submit an application or report activities" period)

Someone that is applying for a credential they do not already have. (As compared to a Practitioner, that already has a credential)

Usually refers to someone that already has a credential, but is sometimes used to also refer to people interested in receiving (i.e. synonymous with Applicant).

Some communities may assign additional meaning. 

A practitioner that has been awarded a diploma (a specific type of credential)

A practitioner that has been awarded a license (a specific type of credential)

We use this term to refer to the staff that use LearningBuilder to manage the daily operations of a licensing or credentialing program such as reviewers, customer service personnel, etc. These users depend on LearningBuilder to do their job but generally do not manage the system itself.

The initial process that an Applicant goes through in their attempt to become a Practitioner.

The process that a Practitioner goes through in order to keep their credential current,

A Discipline, more commonly known as a Credential, is the term given to a scope of practice. This is what binds all elements of the credentialing process together. In LearningBuilder, all Learning Plans a.k.a., Applications, Competency Models, and Assessments "belong to" a single Discipline.

In a multi-tenant system, Disciplines themselves "belong to" a specific Tenant, since Tenants generally represent different licensing boards and credentials are not shared between licensing boards.

See "Practitioner"

When used in context of LearningBuilder, generally refers to an end user that is using the system to obtain a credential or certification. See also "Learner".

A pre-defined Role in the system that has permission to create Activities

A multi-tenant LearningBuilder installation can support more than one distinct business entity in a single website. This is often used when there is some relationship between the tenants, such as when a single professional services organization provides the day-to-day management function for multiple licensing boards.

A “Learning Plan”, also referred to as an “Application”, is the process through which a credential is awarded.

Think of this as the digital equivalent to filling out and submitting a paper form.

An Application often requires the applicant to provide detailed information about their education, training, work history, courses they’ve taken, etc. “Activities” are the containers for this data when they are added to an Application.