Course Starters: Using Desktop and Office Themed Designs in E-Learning #234

Desktop and Office Themes in E-Learning #234: Challenge | Recap

One of the things I like most about office and desktop designs is how their organic nature makes it so easy to create rich and flexible layouts without having to worry about pixel-perfect alignment. No one expects sticky notes or tacked paper to follow strict grid lines.

In previous challenges, we looked at generic course starters, button starters, comic book designs, and course starters for the construction, medical, information technology, and leadership training industries. This week, we’re looking for course starters that use skeuomorphic or flat desktop and office-themed designs.

What are Course Starter Templates?

Course starters are multi-slide templates that include a combination of the most common e-learning content and interaction slides. Starter templates provide a structure to the design, layout, and flow of an e-learning course.

They don’t include every possible slide type, but they include enough slides to give users a working model from which they can begin assembling their projects.

Here are some previous course starter challenges to help you get started:

• Course Starter Templates for E-Learning #123: Challenge | Recap
• Share Your Button Starter Kits for E-Learning Designers #133: Challenge | Recap
• Share Your Course Starter Templates for the Healthcare Industry #171: Challenge | Recap
• Course Starters: Construction Theme E-Learning Templates #183: Challenge | Recap
• Course Starters: Comic Book Theme E-Learning Templates #204: Challenge | Recap
• Course Starters: Academic and Higher Education E-Learning Templates #212: Challenge | Recap
• Course Starters: Course Starter Templates for Information Technology #215: Challenge | Recap
• Course Starters: Leadership Training and Development #230: Challenge | Recap

Challenge of the Week

This week, your challenge is to share a course starter template using the classic desktop or office-themed design.

You can include as many slides as you like, but your goal should be to find the most essential content slides course designers would need to start building a course for leadership training.

You can share either the published output or you can include the source file. We just want to see your desktop design ideas!

Resources

• Here’s a Bucketful of Free Office Themed E-Learning Templates & Media Assets

Office, paper, and desktop theme examples:

• 50+ Beautiful Website Designs Using Office Stationery
• 30 Desktop and Office Themed Website Designs
• 20 Website Designs with a Desktop Motif

Last Week’s Challenge

Before you organize your e-learning desktop, check out the creative ways course designers are showing dialogue and conversations in e-learning:

Showing Conversations in E-Learning #233: Challenge | Recap

Wishing you a great week, E-Learning Heroes!

New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly e-learning challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.