How Are You Using Instructional Design Cheat Sheets?

Instructional Design Job Aids #109: Challenge | Recap

I’ve always relied on templates, cheat sheets, and job aids to help me work faster and more efficiently.

When I wrote courses, I used cheat sheets that included writing snippets for course openings, introducing learning objectives, writing quiz feedback, and interviewing SMEs.

As a course developer, I relied on cheat sheets for Flash and Photoshop shortcut keys, screenshots of common slide and interaction layouts, browser-compatibility charts, and publish settings for audio and video files.

I get that topics like “templates” can be hot-button issues in our industry. But templates don’t have to be about gratuitous visual elements as much as guides to help you improve quality and consistency in your courses.

So when Rachel Barnum directed me to a Reddit discussion on instructional design cheat sheets, I knew this would make a great weekly challenge!

Challenge of the week

This week, your challenge is to share an instructional design cheat sheet, job aid, or reference document that you created.

You can share any type of guide you like and it can be static (image, checklist, PDF) or interactive (tabs, document, labeled graphic, quiz). If you share a document, we’ll add it to our Course Design Assets in the Downloads hub.

Resources

Instructional Design Resources

Downloads

Articles

Related Challenges

 

Last week’s challenge:

Before you create your cheat sheets, check out the updated member profile pages from last week’s challenge:

E-Learning Designers Who Share Their Work #108

E-Learning Heroes Profiles #108: Challenge | Recap

Wishing you a template-tastic week, E-Learning Heroes!

New to the e-learning challenges?

The weekly 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.

44 Comments
Preston Ruddell
Bruno Dethune
Richard Watson
Jeff Kortenbosch
Preston Ruddell
Linda Lorenzetti

Here's a little checklist that I review before publishing a course. eLearning Final Checks Make sure that… 1. PREVIOUS and NEXT slides are correctly set 2. Watermarked images are replaced with purchased images 3. Set slides that require it to reset to initial state 4. Timelines end at the end of the audio or video, no gaps 5. Check that the slide wording is in the notes section 6. All resources are attached and are named the same as they are on the slide 7. Ensure that any check boxes that are used are button sets, so that the learner can only make one selection at a time 8. Add alt/text labels to images/diagrams and charts 9. Adjust the tabbing order so that a learner can progress through a slide logically 10. Remove extra spaces between text in the captions section fo... Expand

Marie Ortiz
Montse