The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word ‘template’ as “a pattern made of metal, plastic, or paper, used for making many copies of a shape or to help cut material accurately.” Simply put, a template serves as a pattern. Once copies of the shape are made, they can be tweaked to be used in a variety of ways. In the same way, eLearning templates serve as a framework for the course to be built on. They give a structure to eLearning courses while offering customization to suit your training needs. The visual elements and functionality of templates can be easily modified based on specific instructional requirements.
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eLearning templates offer pre-built interactions, ready-to-use designs, patterns, and layouts, eliminating the need to for eLearning developers to design screen from scratch. Customizable templates meet all your design needs and make the entire process of eLearning course development simpler and faster. And if you’re afraid that using eLearning templates will lead to boring and monotonous courses, you can’t be more wrong. eLearning templates can lend themselves to designing really creative, instructionally sound eLearning courses.
Why Use eLearning Templates?
- To standardize for consistency
- To foster brand awareness
- To save development time & cost
Amazing Advantages of Using eLearning Templates
Standardization for Consistency
Standardization is one of the major advantages offered by eLearning templates. There are quite a lot of common elements across eLearning courses, for instance, slides depicting Learning Objectives, Definitions, Process Steps, and Assessments. eLearning templates offer different options for such common elements. Once a template is chosen, the content simply needs to be placed within the placeholders. This eliminates the need to design each slide from scratch and simplifies the process.
eLearning templates work the same way for eLearning curriculums too. (A curriculum is a series of courses on a particular topic.) A course curriculum can have a standard design for specific screens like the welcome screen, learning objective screen, and assessments screen. Using eLearning templates to standardize a curriculum’s design helps both the developer and the learner. For the developer, it saves time and cost which can be used to make the course more engaging.
For the learner, standardization leads to easier navigation. When the graphical user interface is standardized, the learner doesn’t have to spend time decoding (!) the navigation and can access information more quickly. It also helps the learner recognize the course as a part of a curriculum, providing a sense of continuity and familiarity, making learning easier.
Brand Identity for a Sense of Belonging
Organizations invest a lot to ensure their branding stands out. Branding provides a unique identity to your online courses and creates a sense of belonging in learners. Customizable eLearning templates make the whole process of branding simple and streamlined.
Templates can be created with your company’s colors, logos, fonts, styles, and images – according to your style guide – that can be followed for all courses. This consistency adds an element of visual professionalism to your courses. Once a branded eLearning template is built, the team no longer needs to search for logo files, color hex codes, or branding style guides every single time.
A good eLearning vendor will follow your style guide to the tee. They will customize the eLearning templates down to the last detail to align with your brand’s look and feel.
Save Development Time and Cost for Maximized ROI
Reducing development time is probably one of the most significant and obvious advantages of using eLearning templates. They go a long way in simplifying and speeding up the most time-consuming portions of online course creation – storyboarding, creating visual assets, developing the course using the selected authoring tool, and testing.
Templates eliminate the need to develop the course from scratch by providing high-quality layouts. From in-built immersive games to interactive scenarios to creative assessments, templates provide you with everything!
Good eLearning vendors create development kits for organizations they consistently work with. These development kits contain templates customized to the organization – from the branding colors and interactivities, right down to the icons used in the courses. This makes course development truly rapid.
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A lot of eLearning templates are offered by authoring tools that can be customized according to your requirements. Let’s explore them now.
Templates Offered by Authoring Tools
Authoring tools offer eLearning templates for common screens and for interactive elements such as games, scenarios, and assessments. These can be customized down to the smallest details and used for different needs.
Welcome Screen
The Welcome Screen is the first page of the course. It gives a glimpse of what learners can expect from the course. Welcome page templates should be designed well and reflect the organization’s branding, and set the tone for the learning that will follow.
Learning Objectives Screen
Adults are most interested in learning that has an immediate relevance to them. That’s why it’s important to inform them what they would be able to achieve after completing the course. This is done through performance-based learning objectives. There are a lot of creative ways this screen can be customized, instead of using simple bullet points.
Formative Assessments
While the basic functionality is offered by the tool, templates can be customized by changing the drop area, adding images, personalizing the feedback message, and more.
Pro Tip Articulate Rise offers a lot of templates called blocks that make it easy for instructional designers to quickly design eLearning courses from text-heavy content. Also, courses developed on Rise are fully responsive. Some common blocks include:
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Parting Thoughts
We have explored some of the amazing advantages offered by eLearning templates. We’ve also seen how they can be customized to produce quick, appealing, and instructionally sound courses. And if you are looking to become an eLearning champion, explore these eHacks that offer timely tips for efficient eLearning design and development.
