If you’re in the business of developing e-learning content you can’t have failed to notice that things are getting tough. Although the industry is finally growing steadily now, most of the growth in revenue isn’t going into the pockets of content developers. Indeed, the two fastest growing categories of e-learning software, rapid development tools and social software, both represent substantial strategic threats. The former aims to shift the balance of content development into the hands of subject matter experts and amateurs. The latter reflects a growing belief that people learn most effectively through dialogue with each other, when they want to, not from information structured by anonymous “experts”.

And all the while, content developers and their clients continue to fail to measure what they do in a way that proves it provides real value. That is, they have no idea if it works. No wonder there are cost pressures on content developers. If you can’t prove the value of something, the temptation is to try to buy it for less.

The most common way that e-learning developers try to keep costs down – other than using cheap labour offshore – is through template systems and libraries. The idea is simple: by having re-usable components of various sorts, e-learning can be produced quickly, at reasonable cost, at established quality levels. Of course, this sounds suspiciously like re-usable learning objects. But as object re-use has been all but abandoned by serious players in the industry, let’s not go there for now.

I’ve been fortunate over the last couple of years to be involved in a range of projects that represent a complete spectrum of approaches, from the most thoroughly templated, to the most artisanal or organic. Typically, but not always, those at the templated end are dull and ineffective. Typically, but not always, those at the artisanal end are expensive and have consistency problems. Both positions waste money and do the reputation of e-learning no good at all. Most e-learning developers wander somewhat aimlessly at the mid point of the spectrum, mostly using base-level template to produce e-learning that is both dull and inconsistent, both expensive and ineffective.

My view is that if you're in the business of producing "content", pretty much everything you do should be templated. An effective templating strategy will result in better e-learning, happier learners and clients and lower cost production. The problem currently is that e-learning developers have a limited, industrial view of what templating means, based on refining a constrained set of interaction types inherited from early technology-based training.

So I thought I’d try to produce a set of principles on which to base an effective template strategy.

• Templates must exist, and interact, at different levels of scale. If we assume that a template is any component that can be re-used during design and development, then such components could be whole course structures, screen sequences, individual screens or screen components. The key thing about this is that components at each level of scale, and between different levels, need to work together coherently. They need to form a loosely structured “language”, the elements of which may be assembled, and re-assembled to meet different needs. This is similar to the concept of pattern languages, as developed by architectural theorist Christopher Alexander, and widely used in software development. It's also the principle on which this part of the site is based...
  
• Templates must support every part of the design and development process . It’s understandable that most e-learning producers use template systems primarily to cut development or build cost. But by over-focussing on this one relatively limited form of cost reduction they demonstrate that they’ve neither understood where value is created in the e-learning value chain, nor where most waste occurs. Template systems could be structured to facilitate high value activities such as diagnosis of client needs or creative design of learning strategies. For example, a comprehensive, user-focussed library of easily accessible templates is an excellent way of feeding a learning designer’s creativity. And one of the most serious causes of the erosion of profit margins for e-learning developers is re-work as a result of clients misunderstanding what they’re going to get. Yet a well-considered, user-focussed template policy could all but remove this problem. By building sales demonstrators and early prototypes from re-usable components, developers could draw users and clients more fully into the design process. This would shift the emphasis of the production process from a specification-driven one, (and who ever reads specifications?) to a user or prototype driven one. There’s a growing mass of evidence from the new media mainstream showing that prototype-driven approaches are more likely to deliver what users and clients need, at lower total cost.
  
• Templates must be based on sound theories of learning, and of learning design. This is a tricky one, and it doesn’t make much sense if it’s divorced from my first point above. A single drag and drop screen can’t of itself embody a theory of learning (although badly designed ones can, and often do, preclude the application of any theories of learning). This is one reason that so much current e-learning, based on an atomised, information-based view of how people learn, fails to deliver. On the other hand, a drag and drop screen could easily form an effective component as part of a well-considered language of interlinked patterns. Yet much of the e-learning industry continues to fixate on an extraordinarily limited selection of templates that CBT pioneers from 1982 would recognise, missing the point that these represent the legacy of educational philosophies that even back then were regarded as redundant.
  
• Templates must be designed to accumulate knowledge around them. What designers in other industries do supremely well is elaborate on re-usable components, so that these components evolve and accumulate knowledge around them. I was talking to a designer of night club interiors a month or two ago and she told me a story about how, in designing a staircase for a new venue, she had got the low-down on how similar staircases had been used in about 10 other clubs. The critical thing here was not the staircase itself, but the knowledge surrounding it. E-learning designers have huge advantages over many other types of designer, because the components they re-use are digital, so the knowledge of previous use can quite literally be appended and accessed as required. Yet most e-learning template systems continue to regard the physical object – the template – as the main point of interest, not the expertise surrounding it. So each time the component is re-used, it is done so blindly. In an industry that purports to understand how people learn, that is unforgivable.

My conclusion: having looked at a range of companies, using a range of templating systems, all the elements of effective templating strategies are in place – but never in one place. An organisation that applies all four principles would gain significant strategic advantage.