The Rapid Elearning Blog

Archive for the ‘Templates’ Category


free e-learning interaction

I built a simple sorting interaction to show how to work with sliders and variables for a workshop. It’s a fun and simple interaction so I cleaned out the data and made it so it can work as a template. It’s yours to use as you wish.

free e-learning interaction

Click here to view the demo.

Tutorial: Interactive Sort Activity

Here’s a YouTube tutorial that walks through the template and explains how to customize it.

A few things you’ll learn:

  • Customizing the slider
  • Animation-based triggers
  • How to customize the sorting activity

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.





e-learning templates made simple

E-learning templates are a great way to save time. This is especially true for those of us who work with repetitive content and courses. And it’s even more true for those of us who aren’t graphic designers since the e-learning templates provide nice looking visual design.

However, working with templates can be a challenge. Sometimes they present too many choices (which can debilitate). Another challenge is that to modify templates often requires a more involved understanding of the authoring tools. This isn’t easy for the person just getting started.

Here are a few ideas to help simplify working with templates.

E-Learning Templates Are the Second Step

Figure out what you need before you build first. A big time waster is not knowing what you want in the course but building it, anyway. Then realizing it’s not what you want, you tear down and rebuild. Or worse, you move forward with a bad idea and let it dictate the rest of what you’re doing because of the time already invested.

I like the weekly e-learning challenges to play around with ideas and to see what others do. The challenges help develop fluency with the software and build awareness around ideas that can be implemented before you work on a project.

ACTION ITEM

Let the Content Determine the Right Template

Templates are great, but don’t let the template dictate your content. This is one of the biggest issues with templates. We like a template because it has sixty cool layouts and then we force our content to the template. Or we think we have to use all sixty layouts so we have similar types of content but it all looks different throughout the course because we mix and match the layouts.

ACTION ITEM

  • Review your templates and the various layout options. Then determine when you use them and why. Even if you have a lot of great layouts, it’s a good idea to reduce the layouts you actually use. This provides visual consistency; and repetition is key to good visual communication.

Keep E-Learning Templates Simple

Templates don’t always need to be big all inclusive files with dozens of layouts. It helps to have single purpose templates like just one tabs interaction. The more single purpose the template is, the better you can use it. It’s also easier to customize one slide to match your course than it is to customize an entire template.

e-learning templates

One of the most under used features in Storyline is saving the files as templates. This makes the slides available for the next course. You can insert a single slide(s) or the entire file. The new teams feature in Storyline 360 makes it even better because the slides can be shared with the team and easily inserted in other courses.

In Rise, you can build lessons and save them as templates. Once inserted, they can be modified to meet the course objectives. And they don’t need to be big lessons, you may just want to customize some blocks for easy re-use.  This is especially helpful if you want to use a multiple colors or change the text sizes.

rise e-learning templates

ACTION ITEM

  • Create single slide templates in Storyline and save them as templates. If you’re on a team account, share them with your team.
  • Learn to create and save templates in Rise. I like to create branded blocks where I add different colors and text sizes.

Learn to Edit the E-Learning Templates

Inevitably you’ll need to modify the template. There are some things you should learn about the software so that when you need to change the template it doesn’t take forever (otherwise you lose the time-saving benefit of the template).

ACTION ITEM

Templates are a real time-saver. But to really save time with them, plan ahead so you’re content is prepped; and then learn to use the authoring software used to build e-elearning courses.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.





At a bookstore, you’ll see all sorts of books covering all sorts of content. But one thing you’ll notice is that while they may have different content and even look different they mostly share a similar structure.

What’s in a Book?

What do books have in common?

  • Cover images
  • Title Page
  • Author Information
  • Table Contents
  • Version
  • Chapters
  • Index
  • Appendix

Despite the topic, at some point, the publisher assembles the book and puts it into a structure similar to what’s listed above.

What’s in an E-Learning Course?

E-learning courses are very similar to books. While they cover a range of topics, there are elements that are common to most courses. What are they?

e-learning templates common structure

  • Course Title Screen
  • Table of Contents (as a menu)
  • Instructions Screen
  • Course Objectives Screen
  • Section Title Screen
  • Gate Screens
  • Resource Screen
  • Summary Screens
  • Quiz Instructions Screen
  • Exit Instruction Screens

Since you know those screens are in most courses, why not pre-build them and make them part of your starter template? It’s also a great way to work in the company brand without messing with the content screens.

e-learning templates teams in Articulate 360

Also, if you’re using Articulate 360, you already have a bunch of templates that have a lot of that structure. So it’s a great starting point and big time-saver. And as an added bonus, if you’re using Articulate 360 Teams you can add those slides to your Teams account and everyone on your organization’s team can access those slides. This is a big time saver and lets you maintain the quality and consistency many organizations require.

What pre-built screens would you add to the list?

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.





e-learning font style favorite font

I build a lot of templates and shareable files, so I often use system fonts. I do this so I don’t need to worry about fonts not being installed on the other person’s computer. Most of the time I stick with Open Sans. It’s a nice clean font family that has plenty of options. And it’s one people usually have.

When it comes to working with fonts, I’m not a designer, so I like to keep it simple. I usually look for a title, body, and maybe an extra one for emphasis. So I may have a style guide that looks like this:

e-learning font style guide

However, sometimes system fonts can get a little boring. And besides, we all have certain fonts that we really like, that is until they’re overused…like papyrus. Here are (were) some of my favorite go-to fonts. They’re ones I actually know the names of and can locate on my computer.

  • I like Skippy Sharp for handwriting. But it has gotten a bit old and a lot of people use it now. They need to make a Skippier Sharper font.
  • I use Action Man for comic style modules. But I may go back to the retro Comic Sans which is like the Stranger Things of fonts.
  • I like the slab fonts for headlines. Rockwell is a nice one. But again, it’s starting to get overused.
  • I used to like Pacifico, until others found it, too. Now my fonts aren’t making me special. I’m an iPhone 7 in an iPhone X world.
  • Franklin Gothic is a nice clean font family. As is Helvetica and the many knockoffs.

Today, I was thinking about how many of us have our favorite fonts that we like to use. In fact, if I see a project from someone on our team, I can usually guess who build it by the fonts used in the module.

When I’m in a pinch, I always know I can go with Rockwell for a title, the Open Sans family for body/emphasis, and Skippy Sharp for an accent.

So I was wondering what you use:

  • What’s your favorite title font?
  • What’s your favorite font combination?
  • What’s your favorite handwritten font?
  • What do you do to add emphasis to the text? Do you use a new font, bold, or recolor?

Feel free to share what you use in the comments.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.





free PowerPoint template

There are tons of free dingbat fonts available for download. And they’re great to use for your training and e-learning courses. Here’s what you already know:

Great! But what about managing those fonts and quickly previewing the icons and images you can use? It’s a pain to review them one-by-one.

Here’s an easy way to manage all of those free fonts and preview the ones you want to use to create graphic and icon files for your courses and presentation.

Free PowerPoint Template

free powerpoint template icons

You can download the PowerPoint template here. I made a simple video to show how to use it. Essentially you select the font characters and apply the dingbat font to see the correlation between the keystroke and what it produces.

Here are the basic steps:

  • Create a slide for the font characters. I like to create a single slide for each wingding font.
  • Select the characters (watch the video to see how you only select the letters you want to change).
  • Apply the wingding font to the selected characters.
  • This gives you a single screen with all of the characters and corresponding keystroke.
  • If you want to save the slide, type in the name of the font for quick reference.

Click here to view the video.

As a bonus (and slightly different approach) Taylor at Nuts & Bolts Speed Training offers his free font cutter solution and a number of icons.

What do you do to manage and preview those wingding type fonts?

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.





character templates for e-learning

Looking for just the right images is one of the most time-consuming activities we have when building our courses. It’s easy to get distracted and waste a lot of time. It’s gotten a lot easier over the years now that the software comes with professional templates and thousands of character poses.

As I build courses, I often use the same characters and a few common poses. Which means I don’t need to always search through all of the poses available. And I suspect many of you do the same. So today, I’m going to show you a simple tip to help speed up your production. It’s all based on assembling your own character templates. I walk through the steps below, but the video provides more detailed instructions.

Click here to view the video.

Create E-Learning Character Sets

Even if you have hundreds of characters, odds are you use the same handful over and over again. Here’s how to create some simple pre-built character sets that make it easy to use characters and repeat poses.

e-learning characters sets

  • Select a character and insert it on the slide.
  • Create multiple states of the character. This trick works if you only insert a handful of frequently used or common poses. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of the template.
  • Name the slide the same as the character or descriptive of the type of poses. For example, you may insert only sign-holding poses. In that case, the slide could be titled, Brandon-Holding-Signs.

Create E-Learning Character Set Templates

e-learning characters templates using sets

  • Once you have a slide with the character, save it as a template. This creates a template you can insert into your course. That’s it. Whenever you want to use that character, insert the slide and then copy and paste the character where you need it. Then set the initial state.
  • Ideally, you maintain one character template so it’s easier to manage. In that case, import the new character slide into the main character template file. And keep adding to it as you create custom character sets. This way it’s much easier to view and manage.
  • Bonus tip: you can do the same thing for custom interactions by saving them in a single interaction template.

Save Time Using E-Learning Characters

Now that you have some pre-built character poses, you’ll save some time in your production. When you need one of those characters, insert it from the template and then copy and paste the character into your slide.

The character will always include those starting states. You can set an initial state and use triggers to dynamically change it if you like. Another benefit is sharing the template with your team.

And you’re not limited to just the characters that come with the software. You can also do this with your own characters and the photos you take. Or you can do it for background images. Perhaps you want a template of production images, inside a warehouse, or the cubicle farm in the office. The process is the same.

The software already comes with characters so searching and inserting characters is easy enough. This tip works great if you use a few common poses and don’t want to spend time searching. Set up the templates and you have a good starting point.

Assuming that you want to create some character templates like this, what groups would you create? Talking poses? Sign holders?

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.





free microlearning template

Earlier I shared this free microlearning template. It is easy to use and edit. However, I did receive some questions on how it was created and how to add additional cards. So in today’s post I’ll share a few tips so you can make your own template and edit the one I shared.

Here’s a series of video tutorials that show how to create the simple, yet powerful microlearning template. Check out the last tutorial on how to quickly edit the text. It’s a neat way to leverage the translation feature to do the heavy lifting.

How to Create the Animated Card

We want the card to animate onto the screen and pause. And we want to click on the card to see the other side (of the card, not the spirit world).

Click here to view the tutorial.

  • The first step is to create a card.
  • Add an entrance and exit animation.
  • Add a selected state to the card to create the click and reveal feature.
  • Add a trigger to the card that pauses the timeline when the entrance animation completes.

When you preview, the card should animate in and pause. You can click on the card to select or deselect it.

How to Edit the Normal & Selected States

We want the selected state to have an animated object that comes on and off the screen when the card is selected and deselected.

Click here to view the tutorial.

  • Select the card and double click inside the state you want to edit.
  • Add placeholder text in the normal state.
  • Add a shape to the selected state and add placeholder text to the shape.
  • Add entrance and exit animations to the shape in the selected state.

When you preview and click on the card, it will trigger the entrance animation of the selected state. And when you click on it again, it should trigger the exit animation.

How to Bring a Card On & Off the Screen

When the card animates on the screen it will pause. This allows us to “flip the card” by clicking on the card. When we’re done looking at the card, we want it to exit the screen and trigger a new card.

Click here to view the tutorial.

  • Create a button with a trigger to resume the timeline.
  • Duplicate the card and position it on the timeline after the first card. Repeat as necessary.

When you preview the microlearning interaction, the card enters and pauses. Clicking the button causes the timeline to resume which triggers the exit animation of the first card and the entrance animation of the next card.

How to Edit the Content on the Cards

Clicking into the states of the various cards can be tedious. Here’s an easy way to edit the text for each card.

Click here to view the tutorial.

  • Go to File>Translate>Export to export the text from the course.
  • Edit the text in the document and save it.
  • Go to File>Translate>Import to import the text into the cards.
  • Preview the microlearning interaction to verify that the text alignment is correct.

Importing the text should work well and as long as you don’t add too many characters you shouldn’t have to do any editing.

Here’s another free microlearning template for you to deconstruct and see how it was built.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.





Free Microlearning Template

January 17th, 2017

free microlearning template

Here’s a free microlearning template I created for a workshop on interactive e-learning. The template uses the popular overhead desktop theme. I’m using the interaction as a simple microlearning module. But it could also be a quick knowledge check like this one. It just depends on how you want to use it for your own course.

Example of Free Microlearning Template

Here’s an example of the template in action.

free microlearning template

Click here to see the microlearning example.

How to Edit the Free Microlearning Template

What makes this microlearning template work is that it’s really easy to use and modify. The construction is really simple.

  • Create a card with selected states.
  • Add an entrance and exit animation to the card.
  • Create a trigger to pause the timeline when the card’s entrance animation completes.
  • Create a button to resume the timeline.

Want more cards? Just duplicate them and the triggers are duplicated, as well. You can create as many cards as you like. All you need to do is stagger them on the timeline.

Bonus tip:

  • The template starts with a single card. Since I don’t know how many cards will be in the final module, I created a cue point on the timeline. Look at the free file to see what is triggered by the cue point. If you add a bunch of cards, just drag the cue point to the end and all if its triggers move with it.
  • Here’s a tutorial post that shows how to create and edit your own microlearning interaction.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.





free templates

Here’s a list of all of the free resources shared in this blog and a few bonuses. I hope you enjoy them and can use them in the upcoming year.

Free Bonus

Here are a few bonus items not included in previous posts:

Free Applications

Free Multimedia

Free E-Books

Free Templates

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.





free e-learning PowerPoint template

I created a couple of simple quiz templates to use in a workshop and thought I’d share them here as well. One is created in Storyline and the other in PowerPoint. I also added a tutorial video for those who want to learn more about using the template for a simple quiz in Storyline.

Free Quiz Template: Storyline

You can download the free template here. It contains two slides. The first slide is a graphic slide that you can customize to meet your needs. And then once you’re done, do a Convert to Freeform and turn it into a quick quiz questions.

free Storyline template

In the video I show some ideas on how to customize it and apply a color scheme, as well as how to work with the feedback master.

Free Quiz Template: PowerPoint

The free quiz template in PowerPoint is pretty simple. If you want to edit the interactive part you need to do so at the slide master level. This is a good example of leveraging the slide master to make your interactive slides easier to manage and edit.

free PowerPoint quiz template

Hope you enjoy the templates. They’re great to practice using the software features. Feel free to use them as you wish.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.





free flip card interaction

A great way to learn to use the elearning software you have is to create small interactions. As I’ve noted before, at work you may end up building one hundred courses, but the reality is you just build the same course one hundred times. That’s one of the reasons I like and promote the weekly elearning challenges. They provide a mechanism to quickly build prototypes to play around with ideas and learn new production techniques.

A recent challenge was to create a note card interaction. There are some pretty cool submissions so be sure to check them out in the comments. I happened to be working on a note card interaction for a workshop and submitted it to the challenge above. Here’s the interaction:

free flip card interaction

View the notecard interaction in action.

Here are a few things that I highlight in the workshop activity. I also created a quick tutorial that explains the file and how it’s constructed.

  • View tutorial to learn how to create and customize the free flip card interaction
  • Download file for the free flip card interaction

Create Content You Can Use More Than Once

One of my goals when creating any interaction is to design it so it’s easily re-purposed. Ideally, I want it to become a template. In the case of the note cards, I designed them so that I can quickly copy and paste to create additional cards. Then I just need to swap out the content in the card.

In addition, once the interaction is complete it can be saved as a template file where it will always be at your fingertips and available for use in other courses.

Learn to Leverage the Features

For this free flip card interaction I created the cards with a Selected State.  In essence, the Selected State of an object is like a light switch that can be turned on and off. This is perfect for a note card interaction. Click on it to get information. Click on it again to go back.

Using a Selected State also makes it easier to build a reusable template for copying and pasting. Often, we use layers to show or hide content. That means every time I want to duplicate a card, I also have to duplicate a corresponding layer. With a Selected State, I only need to duplicate the object because it automatically duplicates the state. That saves a lot of time creating the interaction and adding additional cards.

Find Inspiration from Others

Josh Stoner does really nice work. At a recent Articulate workshop he showed how to build this drag and drop interaction that gave the appearance of swiping cards left and right. It’s a slick interaction. I used his design to inspire my note cards.

free flip card interaction

What I like about this free flip card interaction is that it allows the user to interact with the screen and this is a key part of building interactive content. I also like that it’s a novel interaction when compared to how most elearning content looks. While the cards kind of serve as flashcards in these examples, they could just as easily be bullet point slides converted to cards. Even if all you have is linear content, you make it a bit more engaging because of the novelty and interactive component. Keep in mind: it doesn’t make it a better learning experience, but it does make it a more engaging interactive experience.

To sum it all up:

  • Develop the practice of building prototypes. If you need some structure or calendar, participate in the weekly challenges. You don’t need to do them every week, maybe once a month or every couple of months is fine.
  • Get more life out of the features. This comes with practice (see above) and connecting with more experienced users who have developed some good best practices and creative techniques.
  • Find a source of inspiration. Make it a habit to look for good multimedia examples and then try to recreate them in your software. It’s a great way to learn to use the tools in a new way and also to see your projects and the potential interactions they offer.
  • Free download. Here’s a link to the flip card interaction. I’ll leave it to you to download and deconstruct to learn more. If you need help, watch the tutorial.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.





free resources

Free resources always come in handy when building courses or slide presentations. At most of my workshops we take a few minutes to share different free resources people use. It’s a great way to be reminded of resources you may have already bookmarked but have forgotten. And of course, there’s always something new to learn from others when the share what they use.

At this point, I find that there’s not a lot of new free resources being added. So I compiled the resources and put them in some sense of order to make it a bit easier to parse. I can’t vouch for all of the sites but from what I can tell, they’re all legit.

Most of the resources are free. And with all things free, be sure to check on the usage terms and give proper attribution. Here’s a post on how to did this: how to use free assets in commercial projects.

Where to Get Help from the Community

Where to Get Free Resources from Your Organization

  • Marketing team: they usually have graphics and other collateral
  • Web team: collection of online resources
  • Public relations: public facing graphics

Create Your Own & Share

  • Take your own pictures of people and share
  • Walk around organization and get background and ambient images
  • Get inspiration from stock photo sites and try to mimic them

Free Resources: Icons

Placeholder Content

Free Stock Photos

Free Medical Images

Free Illustrations

Free Templates

Free Audio

Free Fonts

Free Video

Deal Sites

These sites aren’t free but they often offer great deals. For example, I’ve been able to get a lifetime membership to a graphics site for $49 and picked up a bunch of cutout people images for just a few dollars. It’s worth subscribing to these types of sites just to see what deals come your way. Most of the deals are not relevant to elearning but you can just delete those emails.

If there’s a free resource or site you like to use, feel free to post in the comments. Spammers will be deleted.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.