"Bottom-up" vs "top-down" is the general name for the two approaches, although they're not specific to learning (also e.g. to project planning). Edit: Actually

"Bottom-up" vs "top-down" is the general name for the two approaches, although they're not specific to learning (also e.g. to project planning). Edit: Actually I'm not sure that's really right, even example-led approaches are usually bottom up. For example, an example-led approach to programming would start with "hello world" and work up from there, leaving a full-blown example project (if there is one) to the end.