Why Should You Use eLearning Templates? 7 Reasons Follow
How often have you faced a situation when you are required to create eLearning modules that must be deployed within short timelines? Quite often, right? Then, we start looking for something instant, fast-paced, and at the tip of our fingers! We don’t wish to invest too much time and efforts in development, given the nature of the timelines. We think on our toes on how we can provide a quality product to the client while retaining the engagement factor, minimizing development time and effort, and ensuring timely delivery to the client. What could help you address all these issues?
The answer is simple; eLearning templates. We have been using them regularly and have seen how it reduces the effort as well time invested in our development phase.
Let’s look at some of the key benefits of using an eLearning template library:
1. Professionally Designed Layouts
Most eLearning templates are professionally designed. This makes them not only visually and aesthetically appealing, but also ensures instructional value and quality. Quality Assurance (QA) teams also provide input to make sure the templates are user-friendly, which leads to an enhanced user experience. Using templates which have been designed and tested by other professionals adds finesse, as well as creativity to your screens. It also adds an assurance of the appropriateness of the layout, leading to lesser time spent on changing the layout!
2. Tested And Approved Functionality
Templates present in a template library are often tried and tested in a variety of courses developed across multiple domains and subject areas. This often means that the template has undergone various iterations, value adds, and quality check to reach a stable and optimized state.
3. Creative Design Ideas
Instructional and Visual Designers can often get inspiration from a pre-built template library, which gives them a multitude of different options in terms of presenting a type of content. It often happens that a designer comes across a template which represents a more befitting layout. It could be better than what they have visualized or simply an enhancement to their existing design idea.
4. Instant Availability
Designing and developing a screen involves conceptualizing, creating a layout, shapes and graphics, aligning the screen elements, sequencing the page animation, and programming it to function smoothly and effectively.
These tasks require a considerable investment in terms of time and effort. Additionally, they also require strong understanding and skills in Instructional and Visual Design. eLearning templates eliminate these efforts by offering readymade and creative out of the box designs. Since eLearning templates are already developed and functional, they can be used as and when required, without a dependency on a developer. Think of them as instant coffee, quick to use, and ready when you want it!
5. High Level Of Quality Assurance
As a part of our development process, we quality check all the screens, to check for any bugs or functional issues. eLearning templates help reduce or minimize this iteration as they have already been tested by QA teams. This results in templates that are pre-tested intensively for their functionality, resulting in a bug-free output. This eliminates or reduces the need to re-test your developed output.
6. Flexible Customization And Visual Consistency
eLearning templates may provide instant design ideas and layouts, but they are also flexible enough to be customized according to course content, branding, visual design strategies and learner/client preferences.
In addition to customization, they also help in maintaining consistency across the course. Take the example of a multi-phase process that is to be taught in a course. A process-oriented eLearning template can be used across the course to represent, elaborate on and display continuation of the various phases in the process. This consistent use of the template will also add a sense of familiarity from the learner’s perspective.
7. Simplification Of Learning Content
Often, we develop courses on complex but crucial subjects. We are often challenged with simplifying the content for the learner, making it easier to understand. eLearning templates help us break down complex content using visuals. Their intuitive layouts also ensure that the simplification is effective and engaging, leading to a highly impactful course.
In conclusion, eLearning templates offer more benefits than just reducing development time and effort. They are pre-tested and approved, offer customization and consistency, and inspire design ideas among course developers.