When Time is Money E-learning Templates and Successful Business Models

As a e-learning content development firm, you’re bound to be busy.

How do you ensure that you’re delivering consistent, quality content to all your clients?

You need to customise elearning solutions for every client that approaches you, but

Do you have the resources to begin from scratch each time?

An effective way to save time, money and design quality learning solutions across the board is to create e-learning modules using templates. The use of templates improves productivity and makes sure that you adhere to personal and industry quality standards.

Here are certain other benefits that make e-learning templates popular among instructional designers and other e-learning professionals.

1. E-Learning templates save development time: Templates eliminate the need to develop e-learning content from scratch. Most learning content for a certain industry employs the use of common elements such as definitions, procedures and presentation patterns. A ready-to-use template that already contains these elements is far more efficient than beginning from scratch each time similar activities need to be presented. A ready template allows designers to focus on the content itself rather than layout and presentation, most of which is incorporated into the template itself.
2. Templates reduce development cost: Standardization of components enables designers to reuse e-learning developments, thereby cutting cost. A lot of the ideation is done for you; online template libraries offer a variety of templates that incorporate multimedia learning options, like games. As a result, using a template means that time spent per module is reduced, and as age-old business wisdom goes, time saved is money earned.
3. E-learning templates are easy to use: E-learning professionals can make use of free templates that are available in online libraries. For professionals who use templates, a knowledge of programming or designing can be useful, but is not a prerequisite. Templates have vast collections of unique and ready-to-use designs, patterns, layouts, etc. These are extremely user friendly and allow for experimentation. E-learning professionals are spoilt for choice: apart from the countless resources available on the internet, there exist authoring tools that allow you to design your own templates. Creating effective e-learning modules can be as simply as copying and pasting content into a template!

We mentioned above that there are authoring tools that allow you to custom-design your own templates. A popular software for designing e-learning templates is Captivate, an application that belongs to the Adobe suite. It is a rapid responsive authoring tool that can be used to create e-learning content like software demonstrations, simulations, branched scenarios and randomised quizzes. For designers today, it is the preferred tool as Captivate has the capability to create application training programs and software tutorials with ease.

Participating in a profitable business today means taking on multiple projects with high turnover rates and simultaneously winning and retaining customer loyalty. Essentially, businesses have to provide consistent, high-quality customers to their clients again and again, while minimising time spent on projects. In the high competitive e-learning development industry, templates like Captivate allow you to tick all the boxes. Quality and consistency are assured, and time spent per project is reduced. This, in turn, translates to satisfied clients and a healthy, profitable business model.