Numerous authoring tools can import PowerPoint slides, including Articulate Presenter and Adobe Presenter. What you put on these slides becomes part of the e-Learning content, so it’s pretty darn important.
Creating effective, PowerPoint-based e-Learning requires thinking in some new ways. Often, the most important part of creating PowerPoint slides is deciding what to leave out. In this month’s column, I’m going to take this approach to thinking about content.
What not to do when developing PowerPoint for e-Learning
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Don’t design slides that look like PowerPoint slides. Your slides shouldn’t look like typical (boring) bullet-point-driven presentation slides (Figure 1):
Figure 1. Typical boring bullet points for a presentation
Instead, make them look like e-Learning content (Figure 2):
Figure 2. The same information, in visual form.
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Don’t present learners with a wall of text. If you want learners to read a lot of text, provide them with downloadable documents. Instead of massive amounts of text, put a relevant image or a little bit of text on the screen, and use narration to explain what is on the screen. Ask yourself what the least amount of text you can use in order to facilitate learning is. PowerPoint is a visual communications tool. Use relevant:
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Images
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Drawings
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Screenshots
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Graphs and charts
PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 SmartArt provides some visually appealing ways to present text content. (That’s what I used to make the job analysis graphic in Figure 2.)
For example, Figure 3 is a slide with faaaaaar too much text.
Figure 3. Way too much text.
The first problem with Figure 3 is that all this text is boring. Zzzz. The second problem is that learners will be reading your slides. Humans are unable to read and listen to narration at the same time. In addition, humans read faster than narrators talk. If the narrator reads what’s on each slide word for word (research has shown this to be a huge no-no), learners will finish reading each slide before the narrator finishes reading it aloud.
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Don’t leave learners completely passive. Watching PowerPoint slides is a pretty passive experience. If the message is concise, the narration really interesting, and there are interesting and relevant graphics, you can keep learners engaged – for a brief while. You will get better results by considering some less-technical ways to increase engagement, even if you aren’t quite ready to add higher levels of interactivity.
For example, ask a question on one slide (Figure 4):
Figure 4. Might this question raise the level of engagement?
Then provide the answer on the next slide (Figure 5):
Figure 5. The answer is the payoff for their attention.
