Tempting Templates: Creating Custom e-Learning Solutions
Posted by Allen Interactions on Tue, Oct 13, 2009 @ 01:53 PM
by Michael Allen, CEO
I have a love/hate relationship with templates. Mostly hate, actually.
When I started my first project to build an authoring system as part of the CDC PLATO system, another group took off on a different path simultaneously. They felt templates were the solution to making course design and development easier. I felt that no matter how many templates you had, you’d always feel constrained by them. I thought templates would force you into continual compromises. For examples, you might not be able to make the contextual transitions from one template to another you wanted, there wouldn’t be all the options your content needed, you’d be drawn to making the learning experience more academic than authentic.
At that time, no one was proposing to make templates just starter structures which you could easily modify as needed. I think the ability to rework templates easily makes a big difference in the desirability of templates. But still, there’s the issue of academic versus authentic.
What I mean by this is that (as I’m sure you know by now) I strongly prefer e-learning that allows learners to perform tasks that are as close as possible to what they’ll need to actually do after training. In most cases, we aren’t training people to answer on-the-job multiple-choice questions. Multiple-choice questions are academic structures devised for testing convenience. They have their place, but were evolved basically for the same reason e-learning templates have evolved. They’re expedient.
Just as many abilities (e.g. conducting a sales call, interviewing a patient, structuring a business plan, rescuing a flood victim) should not be tested via multiple-choice questions, e-learning experiences need to have appropriate CCAF (context, challenge, activity, and feedback). If you have an authoring tool built from academic-style templates, there’s a strong tendency for the resulting courseware to be academic.
The main problem with trying to use templates to build authentic learning experiences is that instructional content dictates what is appropriate CCAF. That is, it’s difficult to use fill-in-the-blank structures to replicate unique tasks that need to be performed in unique contexts.