Our blog post, eLearning templates, looked at what eLearning templates are, why to use them and what should be included in a good set of professionally designed templates. Let’s now look at the benefits of templated eLearning development. This is the process of building an eLearning course using a set of templates. We use templates for storyboarding and for building in an eLearning authoring tool, such as Articulate Storyline. Templated development helps to create greater consistency, speed up development and enable the building of more interactive courses.
Instructional designers and templated eLearning development
The instructional designer will design the learning experience and content using a storyboard template. For Articulate Storyline courses, the storyboard is usually in slide deck format. The eLearning developer will build the content from the storyboard in the authoring tool. Ideally, both the storyboarding template and eLearning template will match slide for slide. This will make the process of developing the content as efficient as possible.
Where the same person is carrying out both roles they could write their eLearning course into the authoring tool, selecting the best slide template for each piece of content as they develop.
Templated eLearning development makes building online courses great for three reasons:
- Templates create greater consistency
- Templates result in higher levels of interactivity in courses
- Templates make courses quicker to build
Templates create greater consistency
eLearning templates allow the same branding, style and colour palette can be applied to all courses. This gives a cohesive and professional look and feel. They can match be your brand and website to give a great first impression. When the templates are consistently used, there is also a sense of familiarity. This helps learners know what to expect from every course. The more learners engage, the more familiar they will become with the different slide types. Learners should focus their attention on the content, rather than figuring out the slide instructions. Templates can define a common course structure for your organisation. For instance, each course may begin in the same way, such as welcome slide, then accessibility and help information and learning outcomes. Each course could also end with a familiar closing slide. Consistent language also helps create greater consistency for the learner.
Templates result in higher levels of interactivity in courses
Designing slides requires planning the layout, creating the shapes and graphics, sequencing animation and coding it to function properly. This can be time-consuming, especially if you don’t have strong visual design skills. A professional Storyline Template allows you to use slides that you otherwise might not have considered, or not have had the time or skills to build. A template makes it simple to build highly interactive and engaging elements into every course. Even if you have experience in designing eLearning courses it’s likely you’ll still get new ideas from using high-quality eLearning templates.
Templates make courses quicker to build
Templated learning development reduces development time and cost. You can reused templates every time you want to put a course online. In an ideal world, the instructional designer would hand over their storyboard to the eLearning developer. The storyboard should contain all of the necessary information they need to build the course. This reduces the amount of back and forth about specific slides, instructions or content. It also makes the process easy to trust and follow.
Templates are also pre-tested which means there’s much less chance of identifying an icon or button that doesn’t work. The bugs have been ironed out. This reduces development time, costs and provides an overall better experience for the learners.
Get started with templated eLearning development
Developing online courses using templates creates greater consistency and reduced development time and costs and it results in more interactive and engaging courses. At The Learning Rooms, we offer professionally designed template for Articulate Storyline 360. This includes a storyboarding template for the Instructional Designer. Because both the storyboard template and Articulate Storyline 360 template match, it makes it very easy for someone with little or no eLearning authoring experience to build online courses. Of course to write well designed eLearning courses that will excite and engage your learners requires more than just templates, we also offer a suite of Instructional Design and Articulate Storyline training options around our templates. If you’re interested in finding out more get in touch.
