Live elearning

The Template Dilemma: This article came via Robin and sparked some interesting conversation about the value and risks inherent in using templates. At lunchtime our talk turned to the risk of templates being used, without then taking the critical step back from a page or project and looking at the created entity.

In a lot of ways, templates do ‘lower the bar’ for skills required to achieve relatively good looking, and functional elearning or more general webpages. The explosion of blogs, wikis, social networking sites all depend to a large extent on templates that the user fills in, and the advanced user individualises to their own preference. eXe is a template driven approach to elearning, consisting of building blocks the user fills in and combines to suit their learning design approach. In our Learning Resource Support work with teaching teams, having tools like these available certainly makes it easier to get people going. Yes, people do bump up against the wall when the templates don’t ‘let’ them do something they want. But it is a small pay-off. Saves having to learn Dreamweaver upfront!!!!!

When we get requests for templates for print based work, I have to admit we don’t have a decent response (yet!) for this building of a resource. I’d like to promote the use of approaches such as used for the Learner Guide development, and also processes such as that facilitated by the Learning Design Toolkit. That is now on my to-do list to address after writing this post.

Where do templates get messy?

• when we try to make them fit another purpose without really tweaking (eg, I like the colour, now I’ll apply it to a completely different problem)
• when they are seen as the way it must be (but I thought it had to be exactly like that, I didn’t know we could change it)
• when there is not a connection between the content and the template (we’ve all seen powerpoint presentations where the graphics are fighting with the content)
• where one template is used for everything (just plain boring, plus at risk of all of the above being true)

So what could be best practice in creating and using templates?

1. Create templates that allow and encourage different pages or layouts and presentations of information
2. Make it explicit the template is a framework not set in stone, or that it is set in stone, if the circumstances warrant it
3. Make some elements of templates really easily customisable
4. Provide instructions for using the templates
5. Provide ‘worked examples’ of how the templates can be applied
6. Build up a library of templates and their examples for people to view
7. Use clever approaches like creating stylesheets for eXe

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