We are excited to announce the launch of our new eLearning Template Library . This new library gives subscribers an “All You Can Buffet” of templates, images, and assets.

Here’s some of the grub available on our Buffet:

• Flash Games, Quizzes, and Interactions
• PowerPoint Slide Layouts
• PowerPoint Classroom Games
• Articulate Player Skins
• Captivate Templates
• CutOut People Images
• Branded Themes
• Speech Bubbles and tons of other graphics

You may be wondering, what are the benefits of being a subscriber? Well, here are a few:

• Unlimited Access to the Buffet – you can come back for seconds, thirds…
• Immediate Access to New Products
• Product Upgrades and Enhancements immediately available
• Access to Exclusive Content not available for individual sale

Subscribe now and get Everything!

It’s time to pull up a chair and begin the feast!

Greetings from Hawaii. Do you want to build amazing training? Do you want to engage your learners? Well we have just the answer for you. We just launched some cool new Flash Games! These new games will help you build, to use a local term, ”mo’ bettah” training courses. Our new games include some exciting new features like: new audio sound effects, timed activies, and sports challenges, just to name a few.

Check out these cool new games:

Wheel Spin – In this game, your learners spin the big wheel, answer the question correctly, and earn the points from the spin.

Line It Up – Line It Up is a sequence type game where you have to put all of the options on the screen in the correct order. It is great for quizzing someone regarding memory order.

Try Your Luck – In this fun game, you get to “buzz in” to stop the bouncing game piece, answer the question correctly, and earn points for each correct answer.

Word Guess – The Word Guess game presents your learners with a question and they are given an opportunity to guess the answer by selecting different letters and filling in the blanks.

Jump Shot – Are you ready for a little sports action? In Jump Shot, as your learners answer questions correctly, they earn time to shoot jump shots at the end of your quiz.

Field Goal – Field Goal is very similar to Jump Shot, in that your learners earn time to kick Field Goals for each correct answer in the quiz questions.

Board Game – The Board Game challenge is similar to playing a classic board game. Learners roll the dice, move the game piece, and answer questions.

Card Stack – Sort through a stack of cards to identify the correct answer.

Fishing – Well, it’s just like it sounds…learners get to cast their line, catch a fish, and answer a question.

Come check out our new Flash Games and see for yourself how much fun elearning can be!

Are you developing online training content (eLearning)? Do you want to save money and time? Are there multiple members on your team and you need everything to be consistent? Are there varying levels of technical expertise on the team?

These are just a few questions that we come across while building online training content. Using templates to build eLearning can address many of the questions above. Before discussing a few points let me describe what I mean by eLearning templates.

Templates can include many different assets. Many common ones are PowerPoint master slide layouts that have many different pages ready for you to insert content. There are also various tools that create template interfaces and GUIs for courses. E-learning templates can include buttons, icons, color schemes, images, quizzes, games, and more. Basically they can be used over and over in different projects. Now let’s discuss a few benefits.

Save Time and Effort

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the interface, page layouts, buttons, icons, colors, and the most often used components of an online course ready to go? Right there on your desktop and ready to drag and drop into place?

Having templates ready to go means that you don’t have to waste time re-creating the same pieces for each course. This can be very valuable for those who may not have a strong background in multimedia. It could take a novice designer a long time to create a flash movie or design an asset that an expert could do in minutes. Also, the quality will be very different.

Another huge plus is that the designers can now spend time focusing on writing good material and less on how to make a button look pretty.

Consistency

Many organizations want their online courses to be consistent. They should have the same colors, look/feel, quality, etc. no matter who the individual designer was. Templates can help achieve this desire. Designers have a base to work from and are all using the same files.

You can also develop a template interface player. This would ensure that learners always have the same navigation options on each course. You could also standardize where links to job aids, outlines, bookmarks, and other features appear. The learner becomes familiar with navigating your course and doesn’t need to waste time trying to figure that part out. They can jump right into the training.

Technical Functionality

Are there certain requirements that your Learning Management System has for courses to function properly? Are there guidelines that the IT department has? Templates are a great way to build a file that works within all guidelines and then to share it with the entire department. As designers use the template it cuts down on troubleshooting time trying to determine why something isn’t working. That effort has already been done and only needs to happen once.

Move Beyond Your Talent

There are some amazing multimedia designers that can create some great content for online training. Not all instructional designers are good at creating multimedia. Templates can be created to add a lot of professionally designed interactivity and games to courses. All you have to know how to do is edit the template and then you can add content that is beyond your skill level to create on your own.

Increase Output and Creativity

I touched on this earlier but e learning templates allow designers to spend time on what they do best…writing course content. Templates can allow you to spend project time on the “meat” of the course and not on the “administrative” parts. This has two consequences: 1. You can spend time thinking of creative ways to make your course interesting and 2. You can build more courses in a shorter amount of time.

I hope that this article gave you a few ideas around how eLearning templates can help you and your team.

If you would like to see some templates here are some examples:
eLearning Flash Template Interactions
eLearning Games
PowerPoint Templates

We thought it would be nice to start the New Year by sharing with you a sample PowerPoint Template…for FREE. That’s right, click the link below to go to our eLearning Templates website and download this free template.

Free PowerPoint Template

Are you tired of the same dull classroom training experiences? Why not start the New Year with a resolution to liven up your classroom training content?

The Brothers have been hard at work designing some new PowerPoint Classroom Games that are a perfect way to add some energy and excitement to your classroom training courses. We currently have two different games available: GameShow and Millionaire.

Game features include:

• Professional graphics and design
• Team play available (GameShow)
• Automated score tracking
• Built in timers on each question slide
• Customizable questions and answers
• Compatible with PC – PowerPoint 03, 07, and 10

Game packages include all source files and an additional PowerPoint file with 40+ different branding themes that you can use to customize the game.

I recently discovered a great authoring tool called iSpring Presenter. It runs as a PowerPoint add-on and is simple to use. Whenever I run across eLearning authoring tools I like to plug-in our eLearning templates and see how they work.

iSpring Presenter worked great with our PowerPoint and Flash templates. I built a demo course and inserted various flash games/quizzes. Check out the iSpring templates page for a demo and tutorial video.

If you’re looking for iSpring Presenter templates you’re in luck!

Pre-developed Templates! That’s the secret sauce! We have been making and using eLearning templates for years. If you need to quickly develop eLearning courses, using templates is the way to go.

I developed this entire course in about an hour!

In my example below I used Articulate, a rapid eLearning software that leaverages PowerPoint. I started off with a PowerPoint Course style template that I then customized to match my branding. I used a People Cutout series to give the course a friendly presenter that walks the learner through the training. Inserting some Flash interactions and a game helped make the course more engaging. The interactions and game were made at eLearning Interaction Builder. Finally, the course was published with a custom Articulate skin (player).

Here is a list of the prices and products used to develop this course:

• Articulate Presenter software
• $149 PowerPoint Course Style
• $40/month eLearning Interactions Builder subscription
• $150 People Cutout series
• $450 Articulate player skin

(Updated 3/2011: We’ve launched the next generation of our PowerPoint templates. The billboard style is now one of 40+ themes in our new PowerPoint Templates.)

Announcing a new PowerPoint course style that you can use in your next course: Billboard

This PowerPoint template gives you an instant look/feel for your next eLearning course. Don’t worry about how to design different layouts. Let us do that work. Just focus on the content that you’d like to input.

Features:

• Over 65 slide master layouts in this PowerPoint theme
• Easily change the background color (Just change the color in the slide master)
• Every thing is designed in PowerPoint (No Photoshop required

We’ve added 2 set of people silhouettes (black and white) to eLearningTemplates.com.

Silhouettes can come in very handy while building courses. Here are the top reasons I like them:

• Use them to focus attention.
• They can be made into rollover buttons.
• They keep the people neutral.
• Can be used as icons.

Do you have a Flash file that you’ve inserted into Articulate Presenter and it is doing “weird” things? Does it skip the first frame? Does it just keep playing and seem to ignore the stop actions?

We have many Articulate users that use our Flash Games and Interactions to build courses. I often get questions about how to make the Flash files work properly in Articulate. So I thought that I’d write a quick post that explains the proper settings.

If you have a Flash file that has buttons and navigation built into it (you want to users to click around) then you need these Articulate settings:

Click the Insert Flash button in Articulate and choose:

• Advance to next slide: When user clicks next
• Synchronization: Movie plays independently of slide

Important: Also make sure the flash file is ActionScript2. For now ActionScript3 will not work in Articulate.

For more questions/answers about our templates and Articulate skins please see our FAQ page.

Need Flash interactions for Articulate?