If you’ve ever built an eLearning course from a blank screen, you know the feeling. You’ve got your content, your learning objectives and your deadline breathing down your neck. But before you can even think about writing a single interaction, you’re stuck making decisions about fonts, colours, button styles and slide layouts. Hours disappear. Frustration builds. And the actual learning design? That gets squeezed into whatever time is left.
This is the reality for a huge number of L&D teams and instructional designers. And it’s exactly the problem that a well-designed digital learning template is built to solve.
In this post, we’ll look at why template design matters so much in eLearning development, what separates a good template from a great one and how the eXcolo Template and Toolkit from The Learning Rooms can transform the way your team creates digital learning.
The hidden cost of starting from scratch
Every time an eLearning developer opens a blank project file, they’re making hundreds of small design decisions before a single piece of learning content gets built. What size should the text be? Where does the navigation go? How should a knowledge check look? What about accessibility?
These decisions take time. They also introduce inconsistency. When different team members make different choices (or when the same person makes different choices on different days), you end up with courses that look and feel disjointed. For the learner, that inconsistency is distracting. For the organisation, it undermines the credibility of the whole learning experience.
A strong template eliminates this problem. It gives your team a professionally designed starting point that’s already thought through all those visual and structural decisions, so they can focus on what really matters: the learning itself.
What makes a digital learning template actually useful?
Not all templates are created equal. A handful of nicely designed title slides and a couple of content layouts might look good in a demo, but they won’t get you very far when you’re building a full course with scenarios, branching, knowledge checks and results tracking.
A truly useful eLearning template needs to cover the full range of interactions and slide types that instructional designers actually use in practice. That means content slides, of course, but also interactive elements, activities, processes, accordions, knowledge checks, assessments and much more.
It also needs to be flexible enough to adapt to different teams, topics and audiences without requiring the developer to rebuild everything from the ground up. The best templates give you creative freedom within a professional framework. They’re not a straitjacket; they’re a springboard.
Consistency, accessibility and speed
There are three big benefits that great digital learning template design delivers, and they’re all connected.
- Consistency. When every course your team builds shares the same visual language, navigation patterns and interaction styles, learners know what to expect. They spend less time figuring out how to use the course and more time actually learning. This is especially important for organisations rolling out training across multiple departments, regions or audiences.
- Accessibility. Building accessible eLearning from scratch requires a deep understanding of WCAG guidelines, screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation and colour contrast ratios. A template that’s been designed around accessibility from the start means your team doesn’t have to become accessibility experts overnight. They just build their content into a structure that’s already compliant.
- Speed. This is the one that gets most people’s attention. When you’re not reinventing the wheel with every new project, development time drops dramatically. Teams that adopt a professional template consistently report building courses in a fraction of the time it used to take.
Introducing the eXcolo Template
The eXcolo Template is a professional Articulate Storyline template designed by The Learning Rooms, drawing on over 20 years of eLearning development experience. It includes over 150 modern slide types, covering everything from simple content layouts to complex interactive scenarios and assessments.
Every slide type has been designed to be visually engaging, fully accessible and easy to customise. The template is branded to your organisation’s colours, fonts and logo. So every course your team produces looks polished, professional and unmistakably yours.
But the real power of the eXcolo Template is the time it saves. Teams using it report building interactive eLearning up to 75% faster than starting from scratch. That’s not a marginal improvement; it’s a game changer for L&D teams under pressure to deliver more training with the same (or fewer) resources.
More than a template: the eXcolo Toolkit
The eXcolo Template is powerful on its own, but it’s even more effective as part of the wider eXcolo Toolkit. The toolkit is a fully integrated eLearning development solution that gives your team everything they need to plan, write and build professional digital learning.
Alongside the Storyline template, the toolkit includes a professional instructional design storyboarding template that streamlines the content planning process. It also includes two online courses: Instructional Design for eLearning, which teaches your team how to write content that actually delivers results, and Rapid eLearning Development in Storyline 360, which takes them from the basics through to building interactive, accessible courses with confidence.
There are also tailored training and support packages available, so your team always has expert guidance when they need it. Whether you’re a solo eLearning developer or part of a large L&D function, the toolkit scales with you.
Who is it for?
The eXcolo Toolkit has been designed to work for a wide range of roles and team sizes. L&D managers use it to standardise eLearning development across their organisation. Instructional designers use it to accelerate their workflow and produce more creative, engaging content. Trainers use it to add digital learning to their offering for the first time. And organisations new to eLearning use eXgo Plus as a complete eLearning starter kit to build their in-house capability from the ground up, supported by an LMS and full catalogue of ready made eLearning courses.
Clients including Dalata Hotel Group, Brown Thomas Arnotts, FBD Insurance, publicjobs, Sanofi, TikTok and many more have used the eXcolo Toolkit to elevate their digital learning.
Template design is learning design
It’s easy to think of templates as a shortcut or a convenience. But the truth is, template design is a form of learning design. The structure of a slide, the way an interaction works, the visual hierarchy of content on screen: all of these things shape how a learner processes and retains information.
A poorly designed template doesn’t just look bad. It actively gets in the way of learning. A great template, on the other hand, supports the instructional design by guiding the learner’s eye, reducing cognitive load and creating a smooth, intuitive experience.
That’s why the eXcolo Template was designed by experienced instructional designers and eLearning developers, not just graphic designers. Every slide type exists because it serves a genuine learning purpose.
Ready to transform your eLearning development?
If your team is spending too much time on visual design and not enough on learning design, it might be time to rethink your approach. The eXcolo Toolkit gives you a professional, branded and fully accessible foundation. eXcolo lets your team focus on what they do best: creating learning experiences that make a real difference.
Get in touch to find out how the eXcolo Toolkit can work for your organisation.
