While spreadsheets offer structured data management and analytical capabilities, they eventually start to present significant challenges when used for learning design and content development. Their rigidity, collaboration limitations, and lack of direct integration with learning platforms make them inefficient for scalable and effective learning design. This comparison highlights the limitations of spreadsheets and how Coursensu provides a more effective alternative.
Spreadsheets do not accurately reflect digital or physical learning environments, making it difficult to visualise how learning content will be structured, delivered, and experienced. Educators, in particular those who are new to digital education, will struggle to see the 'final product' when working in a spreadsheet.
Content created in spreadsheets often needs significant reformatting when transferred to an LMS or other learning platform. Data structures, layouts, and embedded elements can cause issues during the transition.
Spreadsheets lack direct integration with learning platforms, requiring extensive manual effort to copy and paste content. This process increases the risk of errors and inefficiencies while adding unnecessary costs.
While spreadsheets support shared editing, they introduce difficulties such as cell locking, formatting constraints, and cumbersome navigation. These obstacles make real-time collaboration frustrating and inefficient.
Spreadsheets are less familiar to many educators and subject experts compared to documents, leading to reduced engagement and higher learning curves when collaborating on content design. Developing engaging content within the confines of a spreadsheet cell can be a limiting experience for the educator, which may reduce their ability to produce a compelling learning experience.
The structured nature of spreadsheets can be beneficial, but it also results in numerous versions of templates and the feeling of 'filling in forms' that individual authors may try to modify according to their preferences, leading to inconsistency and inefficiencies.
Finding specific learning content within spreadsheets is time-consuming. Unlike structured learning design tools, spreadsheets lack efficient search, categorisation, and version control features, making content review and reuse cumbersome.
Spreadsheets provide basic functions for data analysis and visualisation but do not support structured review, approval, and publishing workflows. Additionally, they lack advanced AI-driven automation, assistance, and workflows specifically built for learning design and content management.
Coursensu overcomes these challenges by offering a structured, collaborative, and AI-powered solution for learning design and content development:
By transitioning from spreadsheet-based workflows to Coursensu, organisations can significantly improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance the overall quality of learning design and content development.
Definition: For spreadsheets we refer to the broad range of number and data storage platforms (for example Sheets, Excel, Numbers or Calc).
See below for our responses to regular queries. If your question isn't listed, please contact us.
Yes. Learning Designer users can invite read-only Contributors for free. Contributors can view your designs and provide feedback via comments. Purchasing the Content Editor add-on extends the Contributor capabilities with the ability to edit the learning content.
While a documents offers a lot of flexibility, this can also become a limitation. Eventually you'll find your office tools have hit a limit in collaboration, pedagogic depth or how to reuse great design ideas. We took all that, and more, and made Coursensu.
A lot of very talented people create documents to match their needs. Some of this has inspired Coursensu but the limitations of office tools will eventually slow you down. Our specialist tool offers more functionality because it has been designed with the purpose of helping you make impactful learning with robust pedagogy and workflows.
You can make many content items at once, with copy and paste. We also support the import of .csv - available in most office applications. You could convert your document into .csv for Coursensu and then export from Coursensu as .doc and .pptx if needed by certain stakeholders. For example; you may want to design here, add visuals in PowerPoint and then import into RISE or Storyline - to craft the final learning experience.
Learning design document templates are often missing valuable components, such as constructive alignment, collaborative workflows or pedagogical mapping, which all help produce a more impactful learning experience. It might be faster to add content into a document but the next step in your workflow will be to collaborate with stakeholders, or put content into the learning management system (or similar). Coursensu can export into these formats automatically, saving you much more time in the long-run.
We help you structure learning activities, align with learning outcomes and collaborate with subject experts to create learning experiences in any format and for any platform.
