Our work is based on three important assumptions:

Academic staff who build an electronic course site based on a template retain full control over the content, tools and permissions in their new site (subject to what their default role in the institutional VLE allows) – ‘The purpose of a course template is to suggest, not to prescribe’ (Hill et al., 2012, p. 4).

The research literature in higher education and technology yields many definitions, purposes and types of ‘e-learning templates’. The e-Learning Coach (2011, online) provides the following definition: ‘eLearning templates refer to a set of standard screens you can create for a course to provide visual and cognitive continuity’. One should not underestimate the importance of taking cognitive continuity and cognitive load into account. As one's senses are bombarded with myriad demands and stimuli in today's technologically driven world, there is a risk of cognitive ‘switch off’, if not cognitive ‘burnout’. Hence, the goal of designing and producing electronic course templates is to facilitate building electronic course sites by academic staff – quickly and easily, as well as to make the student learning experience more structured and consistent (see Paper III – forthcoming).

Paper I in this series (Hill et al., 2012) investigated ‘how to find, describe and categorise course design dimensions that will inform our construction of electronic course templates, embracing the widest variety of notions that are expressed informally by instructors’ (p. 5). We proposed a lattice model (Figure 1 in this paper), interweaving Pedagogical Dimensions (Logistical, Practice, Purpose and Participation) with Course Site Properties (User Roles, User Experience, Functionality and Tools, Initial Content and Technical System Settings). We provided two example templates – ‘Cornerstones’ and ‘Web 2.0’ which reflect respectively ‘a strong need for a simple course template for distribution of materials, teacher-to-student … and a course template for those instructors who want to foster collaborative student work online, for sharing and assessment’ (p. 14).

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the United Kingdom found that ‘Practitioners teach and learners learn in a context of increasing choice. Effective practice in a digital age includes selecting the most appropriate tools for the purpose’ (JISC, 2009, p. 51). Interestingly, for various (certainly understandable) reasons, the uptake amongst academic staff of electronic tools and technologies to support teaching and learning tends to remain low (Fresen, 2011). Certainly, whatever support mechanisms (such as templates) an instructional technology team might consider developing, such tools need to offer clear savings in terms of time, energy and frustration. Woodward (2010) describes the dual demands for an electronic template: ‘academic staff should retain flexibility and choice in how they present the detail of their content, and the template should facilitate the work of building a module and not restrict it’ (p. 1).

Jara and Mohamad (2007) make the same point in their project which undertook the design of pedagogical templates for e-learning: ‘The goal of this set of templates is to help academic staff who are starting to use learning technologies in their teaching and learning, by providing a structured and simplified overview of possible options. The aim is to facilitate the journey into using technology in teaching and learning, rather than prescribing it or defining its limits’ (p. 2). Both studies just mentioned (Jara and Mohamed, 2007; Woodward, 2010) report on the development of templates to address specific needs and current practice at their respective institutions. This paper is a similar ‘second step’ for the current authors – to design, develop and support specific templates, together with guidelines for their use within our particular VLEs.

Jara and Mohamad (2007) distilled two models from the literature as ‘offering potentially useful categorisations for our purposes’ (p. 4):

Mason's three models (1998, cited by Jara and Mohamad, 2007):

Content +support model: traditional distance learning courses to which online support has been added;

These two models, and indeed Jara and Mohamad's (2007) resulting set of seven templates, focus on the degree of face-to-face and online learning components in a course – in other words the position of a course along the blended learning continuum. This is certainly one aspect of course design; our collection aims to embrace broader aspects according to the lattice model (Hill et al., 2012).

This section offers a collection of six templates for course sites in a VLE, in a blended learning situation. The set does not attempt to cover the full range of possibilities, or to include all factors that may have an influence on a particular course site. It simply reflects one possible distillation that is intended to be practical, easy to understand and useful to academic staff before, or even without, support from learning technologists.

The hope at the beginning of the project was to discover some sort of visual mechanism (a continuum, a stepladder, a grid?) to represent the collection of templates. However, we came to the realisation that it does not make sense to structure the collection in terms of a progression or hierarchy of any sort, since we seek to avoid implying that ‘more’ e-learning implies better, more highly rated or more innovative learning. Thus, the collection is presented simply as a ‘group’ of templates (see Figure 2). Note that in Figure 2, the ‘Content’ template replaces the ‘Cornerstones’, and the ‘Web 2.0’ remains the same as the example provided in Paper I (Hill et al., 2012).

Some of the templates conceptualised here are customised for a traditional, face-to-face, research-intensive university based on the British (Oxbridge) tutorial model. In such a university, students are free to select which lectures they wish to attend to support their learning pathway, and undergraduate students participate in small group tutorials under the guidance of an expert tutor; hence, the inclusion of a ‘Lecture series’ template and a ‘Tutorials’ template. In a traditional, primarily face-to-face, research university based on the American model, with discussion or recitation components to classes, these two templates might be combined into what might be called ‘Enrichment’ (offering supporting learning materials, over and above the basic ‘Content’ provision of organisational information).

We do not favour the more complex templates, sophisticated and feature-rich as they may be, over the simpler ones but rather encourage the selection of a template at the level appropriate to the pedagogical plan. Academic staff should view their course site setup and maintenance process as a balance between their need to make use of supporting technology and the amount of their time and effort that they can afford to commit to using the technology effectively.

The template building process was the result of a combination of the theoretical analysis undertaken in Paper 1, the practical experience of the authors and the particular institutional context. We met as a small team of learning technologists to agree on the wording for the purpose of each template, appropriate tools to incorporate and how to surface existing help resources to provide just-in-time support.

We started by using the conceptual basis and the two examples that emerged from our earlier work (Hill et al., 2012). We trimmed down the lattice model (see Figure 1), incorporating an eclectic mix of its dimensions (shown in bold in the following text), and leaving academic staff the freedom to make their own adjustments, particularly with regard to the Pedagogical Dimensions. Being a team of learning technologists supporting the use of the institutional VLE, we focused more intensively on Course Site Properties. As we explained in the earlier work, we refined our original intention to derive a mapping from Pedagogical Dimensions to Course Site Properties into a more flexible interpretation of teaching needs.

User Roles are the pre-defined, standard roles within our VLE, with their associated default permissions. The User Experience property was translated into detailed help and support for site owners regarding the user interface (‘Instructions on how to build this site’), together with reasons for incorporating certain features or tools, suggestions and links to help guides and tutorials. This property also reflects the recommended Guidance afforded to instructors (Hill et al., 2012). Figure 3 shows the detailed instructions and Figure 4 shows the links to further help and guidance for one of the templates – the ‘Tutorials’ template.

In terms of Functionality and tools, we agreed on a basic tool set for each template, which we ‘seeded’ with Initial content. For example, in the ‘Lecture series’ template, we included the Forums (Discussions) tool in order to facilitate on-going discussions before and after lecture sessions, and we created a basic structure of forums and topics to guide the site owner. We included an RSS News tool, pointing to a feed that can easily be modified by the site owner in terms of relevance to their particular subject discipline.

No special Technical settings were implemented, beyond the customisations and extra features already incorporated in the open-source VLE currently in use. We set up specific folders in the file storage area, depending on the purpose of the template, for example, a set of folders for an 8-week ‘Lecture series’: Week 1, Week 2, … Week 8. Other examples of translating pedagogical concepts into technical settings are incorporating group-aware tools (such as Discussion Forums and other communication tools) in templates designed to foster collaborative learning, and a tool such as ‘Sign up’ to enable students to sign up for tutorial sessions in the ‘Tutorials’ template.

It became apparent that certain components are recommended in all course sites, regardless of their purpose, such as lecturer contact details, and a files and folders area to host and share resources. The list of recommended components (or ‘minimum requirements’) will depend on the particular institution and VLE in use – this is the list used at the British institution in this study:

Usually an instructor building a site in the Sakai VLE would be a site member with the required ‘maintain’ (design and build) permission. However, since the templates were to be the basis for creating new sites, we clearly could not be site members in the templates – status which would be perpetuated for all new sites. At the British university, we therefore used our ‘admin’ login accounts to enable us to build the templates without actually being site members. (The American university awaits a new VLE that will afford similar opportunities for the presentation of templates to instructors, and implementation by learning technologists.)

At the British institution, day-to-day management and use of the VLE service is devolved to departments and schools. Staff members can create their own sites, if they have the required permissions to do so from their local VLE coordinator. We thus built the choice of a template into the site creation process (see Figure 5). We purposefully made the default option ‘create from template’, requiring the site owner to select a template from among the choices offered. This helps to promote awareness and use of the templates and thus enhance consistency across all new sites created.

We experienced some technical issues in creating a new site based on a template, for example, some features did not copy over correctly to the newly created site (such as the URL for the site logo), and some tool default states had to be modified to be more general (such as setting the Site Stats tool to record activity across all tools, in case the instructor adds other tools later).

Fortunately, the implementation of the templates is an on-going exercise in continuous improvement, without any completion deadline; the technical issues were easily overcome and ultimately contributed to the robustness of the templates.

After building the templates in the VLE, we realised that we also needed ‘example’ versions of the templates for prospective academic staff users to peruse – ‘read-only’ versions. We thus duplicated each template and made the read-only versions available on the help and support site (See Figure 6):

The sample templates are publicly available. The web page displayed in Figure 6 can be accessed from https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/info – select ‘Template sites’ in the ‘Showcase’ box.

The templates were promoted via the VLE user group, departmental newsletters, mailing lists, blog posts (Geng and Marshall, 2012; Highton, 2013) and various other institutional marketing mechanisms. Face-to-face training sessions now incorporate a demonstration of how to create a new site based on a template. Anecdotal evidence suggests that responses from academic staff are positive; they have expressed appreciation of the fact that they do not have to start from a blank site, and that they can get their site ‘up and running’ in a short space of time. Students anticipate that further use of the site templates will promote a more structured learning experience from their point of view (see Paper III, forthcoming).