Most faculty build a course by copying last term’s shell and editing from there, which means the structure, the formatting habits, and the accessibility of a course all tend to carry forward, year after year, whatever they were the first time. A course template, a pre-built shell an instructor starts from, is a chance to make the accessible, well-organized version the default starting point instead of something to retrofit later.
Here is what tends to go into a good one, and how institutions get them in front of faculty.
What a good template provides
A consistent structure students can learn once. A predictable module pattern, overview, then materials, then activity, then assessment, so students juggling five courses are not learning five different logics at once. The template ships with the pattern already in place, plus a short note on adapting it.
Accessible defaults built in from the start. Heading styles used correctly, so screen readers and the table of contents work. Sufficient contrast in any theme elements. Descriptive link text instead of “click here.” Alt-text prompts on image blocks. The instructor inherits all of this without needing to know the underlying rules.
A syllabus template that is already structured. Headings in place, a table for the schedule instead of a tab-spaced list, and the institution’s required policy language already sitting where it belongs.
Starter pages for the things that are easy to skip: a “how this course works” page, a “getting help” page with the real support links, an accessibility statement, an academic-integrity section. Faculty can edit or delete any of it, but it starts present rather than starting blank.
Prompts instead of blanks. Instead of an empty module, a module with commented guidance: “add your learning objectives here, three to five, phrased as what students will be able to do.” The template teaches a little as it goes, almost without anyone noticing.
What it deliberately does not do
A template is a starting point, not a straitjacket. It does not lock formatting, mandate a specific tool, or stop an instructor from restructuring things their own way. The programs that land well are explicit that the template is a convenience, use what helps, change what does not, and that the accessible defaults are the one part genuinely worth keeping intact.
How institutions roll them out
Make it the default for new course shells. When a course gets created, it comes from the template rather than starting empty. This is the single highest-leverage step, because it reaches every course automatically, without anyone having to opt in.
Offer a one-click “apply template” option for existing courses, so faculty migrating an older course can pull in the structure and the accessible styles without rebuilding from scratch.
Pair it with a short walkthrough, a fifteen-minute video, or a live session at the start of term, showing what is in the template and how to adapt it. The template and the walkthrough together do far more than either does alone.
Keep a few discipline variants where they genuinely differ, a lab-course template, a studio template, a large-lecture template, rather than forcing one shape onto everything regardless of fit.
Version it, and tell faculty when it changes. As the LMS updates and accessibility guidance shifts, the template gets maintained, and instructors hear about the changes that matter.
Why it is worth the build
A template is a modest, one-time piece of instructional-design work that changes the starting point for every course built from it afterward. It makes feature adoption easier by handing faculty a working example to adapt rather than a blank page, and it takes a real bite out of the accessibility backlog at the source. Because a course that starts accessible mostly stays that way.
Emily Connelly is an instructional multimedia technologist at Wrightmann Education Technologists. Part of the Learning Platforms series.
References
- W3C. (2018). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/
- CAST. Universal Design for Learning Guidelines. https://udlguidelines.cast.org/