When it comes to cooking, your approach to it determines your experience of it.

It is exciting and daunting. From deciding whether you want an appetizer or an entrée to the prep-time of cooking to plating a dish, cooking is an adventure. Planning makes all the difference. If only the chopping, slicing, dicing, peeling and cleaning were taken care of, more people would cook and be better at it.

It is the same for creating templates. While using templates may appear to be limiting and a necessary evil to speed things up, they have their place as enablers. They provide a comfortable consistency and help you script in a more structured fashion. For example, the way one purees tomatoes will determine whether it will work as a sauce or a soup. Similarly, when designing templates, it’s their quality that will determine the grade of the course.

Here are some cooking tips that you can apply to designing your templates:

Get clear on who the dish is for: Whether it’s a humble sandwich or an elaborate roast, you need to know the palate you are cooking for. Similarly, when you design templates, be clear about the purpose they must serve. Yes, you can wing it but it’s usually dicey. You don’t want your learners to get lost in multi-level gamified scenarios when they were really looking forward to a simple set of interactivities. This is where you identify the target audience, needs and goal analysis – just so you’re not going to make a filet mignon of a course to serve vegan learners.

Stock Check: When cooking a dish, you first make sure that you have everything to make your dish. It’s the same with executing your templates. Take an inventory of the available technology, skill-set to script or create visuals, engagement of the subject-matter experts, the buy-in from the business team, and time. This step is critical because it helps you understand how complex your templates can be and how much flexibility you will have in using them for a course.

Test your recipes for that signature dish: A signature dish can be reproduced with the exact same taste, whether it is cooked once or a hundred times. To come up with such a dish, chefs test their recipes with many ingredients. They experiment with textures and flavors to find the correct balance. Finally, they nail down the recipe so that it can be repeated and reused successfully every time. It’s the same with templates. Explore the various kinds of content that will likely be used in the course. This will help you get a sense of layouts that you may use. For example, you can use organization charts to display hierarchy of roles, layouts that incorporate a full-screen infographic or simpler versions that have click-and-reveal functionality. Know the layout. Get it right and you can work with it to create a reusable template.

Use a recipe as the final dish or base for more:  A good recipe works for a novice and an experienced cook. The novice writer, like a novice cook, can follow the templates to a ‘T’ and still turn out a well-designed course without the heartache of having to learn everything from scratch. The experienced writer, like an experienced cook, can use the same template as a solid base to innovate on. Similarly, when designing templates, be mindful that they are detailed enough for the novice and open-ended enough for the experienced.

Reinvent, according to taste: When you use Grandma’s old recipes, you may find that the elaborate procedures can be avoided because of newer technology or options, such as availability of juicers or pre-cut vegetables. It’s the same for templates. If you use templates from another successful course, assess them against the latest technologies and devices that are available for e-learning. If using pre-existing templates from an older course, update them to match the technology that is available. Also, factor in the capabilities of the users that may have changed. For example, simulations developed for users of mobile technology will be different from their earlier versions because of the difference in the learners’ competency levels using the medium.

Well-designed templates can easily be the secret sauce to your courses.

Written by the Indecomm ID team: Shweta Agharkar, Meghana Jadhav, Priyanka Pereira, Namrata Dixit, Nupur Avantika, Mukta Raut