Using Course Starters to Jump Start Course Design #509

Using Course Starters in E-Learning Development #509: Challenge | Recap

🏆 Challenge of the Week

Have you ever sat down to create a new course and ended up staring at a blank slide, hoping for inspiration to strike? Happens to the best of us. 

Getting started can feel tricky, especially if you're short on time, need something custom, or just don't know where to start. That's where course starters come in handy. They’re like the hamburger helper of e-learning. Just add your own content and you're good to go.

This week, your e-learning challenge is to create a course starter template for any industry or topic you want.

What to Include

Include at least six slides for common content and interactions. Think intro slides, scenarios, interactions, quizzes, and your most-used slide types. The key thing with course starters: You’re not creating an entire course here, just a head start for your next e-learning project.

How Can Starter Templates Help E-Learning Designers Build Better Courses? 

One of the biggest challenges new course designers face is visualizing how their 10,000-word script or storyboard will work as an e-learning course. The visual design is less of a factor than the general structure for the course content. 

 

 

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.

Let’s look at a few examples from our downloads section. 

Business Gray Starter Template 

This template is available in both PowerPoint and Storyline in our downloads. The template features three main sections for objectives, modules, and resources. Five modules, each with a unique layout, were created to give you plenty of options to get started.

View and download the course starter: PowerPoint | Storyline

Medical Course Starter Template

This medical-themed, 12-slide course starter features animated content slides, practice interactions, and graded quiz questions. 

View and download the course starter

Cupcake Course Starters 

E-Learning Challenge #8 is still one of my favorites. In that challenge, designers were asked to take a single clip art file, break it apart into usable pieces, and create a fully working course starter template.

The slides included tabs interactions, media slides, drag-and-drop activities, true-false quizzes, and more. Pretty neat, right?

⚒️ Authoring Tools

You’re welcome to use any authoring tool you’d like this week. If you’re short on time, try quickly mocking up your ideas using PowerPoint, Figma, or your favorite graphics app.

🧰 Related Course Starter Challenges

• Medical Course Starter Templates #171: Challenge | Recap
• Construction Theme E-Learning Templates #183: Challenge | Recap
• Comic Book Templates and Course Starters #204: Challenge | Recap
• Academic Course Starter Templates #212: Challenge | Recap
• Course Starter Templates for Technology #215: Challenge | Recap
• Leadership Training Course Starter Templates #230: Challenge | Recap
• Desktop and Office Themes in E-Learning #234: Challenge | Recap
• Holiday E-Learning Examples #259: Challenge | Recap
• Olympics-Themed Course Starters Templates #338: Challenge | Recap
• Restaurant Menu Inspired Course Starters #373: Challenge | Recap
• Accessible E-Learning Templates #476: Challenge | Recap

🙌 Share Your E-Learning Work

You put in the effort, now let’s make sure people see it. Here are some easy ways to share your challenge demos and get your work noticed:

• Personal blog: If you have a blog, please write about your example from this week’s challenge and share the link with your submission.
• Social media: Please share your examples on LinkedIn and mention both David & Articulate using the #ElearningChallenge tags so we can help promote your work.
• Support your peers: With the new submission format, you can comment directly on each example. Try leaving helpful feedback on at least three projects this week
• Community forums: Feel free to cross-post in the forums to give your work even more visibility.

🎉 Last Week’s Challenge:

Before starting on this week's challenge, check out the fire extinguisher training demos your fellow challengeres shared over the past week:

Choosing & Using Fire Extinguishers #508: Challenge | Recap

👋 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.

Learn more about the challenges in this Q&A post and why and how to participate in this helpful article.