Course Starter Templates for E-Learning #123
Course Starter Templates in E-Learning #123: Challenge | Recap
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.
Earlier this week, Joanna Kurpiewska shared a gorgeous 8-slide starter template for Articulate Storyline. Her template reminded me of how important multi-slide templates are for new users.
View and download the course starter
We share a lot of single-slide interactions in our downloads hub. While those interactions are helpful to designers who have been building courses for a while, new users often want something a little more complete, which brings us to this week’s challenge.
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 hub. 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
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?
Challenge of the Week
This week, your challenge is to share a course starter template that contains at least six slides. You can share more, but the goal is to find the most essential content slides course designers would need to start building a course.
What to include in your course starter:
Please include a combination of introduction, content, quiz, and summary slides. You’re welcome to add more slides, but include at least six slides in your template.
You can share your course starter in Articulate Storyline, Articulate Studio, or something as simple as PowerPoint. We just want to see what your most-used content slides look like.
Resources
Here are a few resources to help you get started.
- How to Create an E-Learning Template That Works
- Here’s How to Build an E-Learning Template That Will Rock Your World
Last Week’s Challenge:
Before you start this week’s challenge, check out the course examples from last week’s Dos and Don’t’s challenge:
Dos and Dont's in E-Learning RECAP #122: Challenge | Recap
Wishing you a template-tastic week, E-Learning Heroes!
New to the E-Learning Challenges?
The weekly e-learning hallenges 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. Just post a link to your demo in the comments section and I’ll update the recap posts to include your work.
265 Comments
Thanks David - I never miss looking at the resources, but I did have to double-check this when no-one else mentioned it. I find it really interesting to see what approach everyone takes to these challenges. It seems that some jump in pretty with something they have already created that they think fits the brief (nothing wrong with this, don't get me wrong!) and others create something that doesn't really fit the challenge criteria at all. I always approach the challenges with a view to learning something, so following the links and reading the resources is what I do first. Whilst it's OK to be super-creative and enter something that everyone seems to like and comment on whether or not it fits the brief, my approach is to address as many of the challenge criteria as I can, b... Expand
Thanks for sharing that, Dianne. I'm still playing with formats for the challenges. I would really like to separate the setup (examples, mini-tutorials) into a separate post. Some of what you wrote above validates what I've seen regarding the intro brief. That's totally okay with me, but I wonder if I would get more mileage out of the posts if they were separate from the challenge. What I'm playing with now is finding ways to make the challenges more like worksheets that only include the challenge, resources, and posting instructions. Resources could point to the set-up post as well as other examples. I always enjoy seeing what you share! And you're right about the various ways people take on the challenges. I don't worry about how closely people follow the challenge brief. ... Expand
Thanks David. Soooo excited that you're coming to visit us in Melbourne! Unfortunately the weather won't be great then probably - it's the start of winter. Although it can surprise us - they say if you don't like the weather in Melbourne, just wait 5 minutes and it will change - and this is so true! I'm looking forward to having many conversations with you, but particularly about this community - now that it's got so many members and challenge participants it seems to be becoming a bit overwhelming in the current format. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty about not getting to comment on others' entries, but there's so many now that it's almost impossible to view and comment on them all. I'm finding that there's not enough hours in my day to absorb all the information in this com... Expand