eLearning Templates
Templates can give Instructional Designers a head start on a project, and help keep us on track.
Here are a few different templates for organizing an instructional design project:
Instructional Design Document, Etherton, 2017
Development Agreement, Di van Santen, 2016
SME Template., Abigail Wheeler, 2011
My current role is as a Training Specialist who works with middle & high school teachers on implementing lessons on sexual and reproductive health. Sometimes, we are working with experienced and certified Health teachers. But more often, we are working with brand new teachers, or teachers who teach a different topic altogether but have been thrown into teaching Sex Ed for their school. This results in quite a wide range of needs! We offer in-class lesson modeling, 1-on-1 coaching, technical assistance, and a variety of training experiences. Some of these trainings are asynchronous e-learnings (trainings on topics such as Trauma-Informed Approaches in a Sexuality Education Classroom and Engaging Parents/Guardians/Trusted Adults). Our core training, however, is our day-long Sex Ed Basics. This training has been offered both virtually as well as in-person. This training includes topics such as: Creating Inclusive Classrooms, Introduction to Reproductive Justice, Navigating Values & Boundaries, State Laws & Best Practices, Queer and Trans Inclusive Sex Ed, STIs, Contraception, and Answering Questions. We also have shorter trainings for more a more advanced deeper dive on some topics (such as Answering Difficult Questions, Reproductive Justice).
From a sustainability focus, I would love to create versions of these various topics and trainings into smaller e-learning modules. It has been increasingly difficult in the past few years for teachers to have significant professional development time, especially with the current substitute teacher shortage. Creating training content that teachers can access whenever they have the time can help address that concern.
As an educator and trainer, I first learned about creating lesson content though an Understanding By Design framework, which is a type of backward design. This has led me to visualize lesson/training development by first determining my desired outcomes and creating content from there. Because of this, I really liked the Instructional Design Document linked in our resources. It follows a similar format to how I would also plan for in-person training content, and this approach would likely also feel familiar to the educators I am training.
