Many years ago I presented a session at a national training and learning conference on some Internet topic. Afterwards I was standing by the refreshments table sipping some tea when a well-dressed gentleman walked over to me, smiled, and introduced himself. I can’t remember his name — but I’ll never forget the conversation!
“You mentioned in your presentation that you are always open to feedback...,” he said, looking me straight in the eyes. When he added, “...well, I want to be honest with you...,” I knew I was in trouble. “I really didn’t get much out of your presentation. In fact I thought it was a waste of my time.” I almost choked on my English Breakfast tea. I could see from his expression that it was not his intention to be rude or antagonistic — he just wanted to be honest with me. He continued, “You had a huge amount of information on those PowerPoint slides of yours. It was all good information and I actually learned something new but... you just read all the text on the slides — I could have downloaded the presentation and read it myself. You didn’t add anything to it — you didn’t embellish it or tell us any stories or find out what your audience knew about the subject. Your session was all about the text on the presentation slides.”
It was all true of course and although part of me wanted to accidentally spill tea down the front of his suit or launch into a defense, I decided instead to listen. He went on, “I think the best use of presentation slides is to put up a few main topics and bullet points and speak to them. The presentation slides are just there as a means to remind the speaker what to talk about. People come to listen to you — the slideware should stay in the background. People want to have a relationship with you and interact with you — they don’t want the slides to be the focus of their attention. They don’t want to have to read more than a few words. They want you to bring the content to life.” I was hoping to say something but nothing came out of my mouth.
“Well — I just thought you might want to know that — you said in your presentation that you’re always open to feedback; maybe keep it in the back of your mind for your next presentation.” He offered his hand. “Thanks for listening, nice meeting you, I gotta run.”
I was stunned. I had left my session feeling like I had done a good job and now, ten minutes later, I felt like I was an absolute novice who didn’t know the first thing about presenting. I spent the rest of the day nursing my ego and attending every session I could to see how other presenters did their thing. I realized my well-dressed, blunt friend had a very good point. The better the presenter the less they relied on the PowerPoint presentation. This sounds obvious to me now but back then it was an enlightening realization.
Now the reason I bring this up is that you can use PowerPoint in an enormous number of different ways but the format you choose must match the purpose. As the great Frank Lloyd Wright said, “Form and Function are One.” If you are using PowerPoint to give a conference presentation then you should be pretty frugal with text; if you are using PowerPoint in a classroom teaching or training scenario then you’ll probably be OK with a little more detailed content and diagrams. If you are using PowerPoint for self-paced e-Learning — as many organizations are now attempting — then you need a completely different form, approach and design.
With the ubiquity of PowerPoint-to-Flash conversion tools and programs such as Breeze, Articulate, PointCast, PowerCONVERTER, etc. more and more companies are converting existing PowerPoint content to Flash for self-paced e-Learning ... and in many cases making a mess of it. When instructional designers (IDs) heard about products that could convert a subject matter expert’s PowerPoint presentation directly to “e-Learning,” many of them rightly started to reach for the Advil.
IDs understand the differences between delivering information and facilitating learning. They also understand the differences in information display appropriate for content intended to support in-person presentation and for content intended to support self-paced learning. Those higher up the food chain in organizations have been salivating over rapid development, cost-effectiveness and content re-use. “If we buy XYZ’s PowerFlash we can use PowerPoint to create all our e-Learning — we won’t need to purchase a new authoring tool! We won’t need those pesky instructional designers — the subject matter experts know PowerPoint — they can develop the content and bingo! — we got us some rapid e-Learning!”
There are companies that are making some fundamental mistakes about how to use PowerPoint-to-Flash tools. The most glaring of these errors revolves around using PowerPoint templates. PowerPoint templates (the ones that come with PowerPoint or that you purchase) are designed primarily for in-person presentations. That is, they have layouts, font sizes, bullets, graphic placeholders, etc. specifically designed to support someone talking about a topic or theme. They are designed to support the information transfer, not be the source of it. Now there are several typical ways that Flash content converted from PowerPoint is used on the Web:
- Synchronous, instructor-led training. Where the remote instructor is teaching as he or she would do in a face-to-face situation the Flash-based PowerPoint content is used to support the instructor’s presentation. Learners can ask questions of the instructor if anything is unclear.
- Asynchronous, self-paced training with narration. Where delivered Flash content is used in conjunction with the narration.
- Asynchronous, self-paced training without narration. Where delivered Flash content is the single source of the e-Learning.
Standard PowerPoint templates are only appropriate for 1) and in some cases 2). This is because when there is a live instructor and a two-way interaction with learners, online content can be frugal and bullet-pointed. The instructor fills in the meat and is present for immediate questions learners might have in order to understand the content. You’ve probably experienced sessions where a presenter or instructor got away with very poorly constructed PowerPoint content only because they were there to explain, clarify, and fill in detail. Even really poor graphics can work if the presenter is there to explain what it really means and bring it to life. As soon as the immediate feedback mechanism is absent we need something more than slides with bullet-points and a few simple graphics.
When there is an immediate, verbal feedback mechanism for learner questions, on-screen content can be simple and bulleted. When there is no immediate feedback mechanism, as in self-paced, then content needs to be more detailed, self-explanatory, and instructionally well designed.
Figure 1 Standard PowerPoint template
Standard PowerPoint templates (see Figure 1) are not suitable for 2) and 3) above — the self-paced content. The standard templates are primarily designed for in-person presentations. They have large fonts designed for an audience to view at a distance. If you use these templates for self-paced training — where the screen is only an arm’s length in front of the learner — the scale of all the content is too large.
When creating self-paced e-Learning the format and layout need to be different (see Figure 2). Use smaller fonts, include more detail, and incorporate well-designed, self-explanatory graphics. There will be no one to interact with or ask questions of, so the content must stand alone.
Figure 2 e-Learning PowerPoint template
Another frequent mistake is thinking that adding narration to an existing PowerPoint presentation somehow will be sufficient for self-paced e-Learning and will compensate for a bunch of presentation slides. You cannot consider narrated PowerPoint slides as an on-line version of ILT. Again, there is no immediate feedback mechanism and, more importantly, the learner focus is on the content, not on the instructor. With ILT the focus is the instructor; and it’s the instructor who brings the content to life. With narrated PowerPoint slides the focus is the slide content; even with narration, using a standard PowerPoint template for the content is inappropriate, un-engaging, and poor design. What’s more, most of the meat of the content ends up in the audio track and not many of us are purely auditory learners.
