Let’s face it, many online courses and training materials are death by text. PowerPoint slides are an endless ocean of bullet points.
Course pages are uninteresting, often just pages of text put into a digital format. In these formats, learners eventually give up or get through it with mindless clicking of the “next” button.
Let’s take a look at how I converted uninteresting slides into interactive goodness.
BEFORE
Quite a bit needed to be changed on this slide deck:
Font - Time New Roman is an old look. Throw in other various fonts and it becomes jumbled. Rather than understand the content we focus on the odd font combinations.
White background - This can be a good design choice when used intentionally. In this example the white background shows a lack of planning and developer laziness.
Consistency - The fonts, pictures and colors have no coherence or meaning.
Simple click through - The words and slides lack animations and understandable graphics.
AFTER
Click image above to open interaction
Here is what I changed:
Chunked content - My first step was to take the original 56 slide deck and chunk it into manageable slices. For this post, I am concentrating on the first few slides.
Font - I standardized and modernized with a stylish font (Yanone). Font size was customized for aesthetics and to determine what on the screen is important. The location of font was also intentional to maximize screen space.
Consistency - Colors were standardized to a simple but effective color palette using Adobe Color CC. Images and graphics were converted to .png and styled for a clean visual appearance.
Interactivity - This was the most time consuming part of the conversion. I sketched out interactive ideas and chose the best to create in Articulate Storyline. To challenge myself with this program all interactions were built from scratch without using templates.
Characters - I added illustrated characters to give the content more interest and appeal. In the parallax experiment, seeing a character conduct the experiment makes the student feel less silly trying it themselves.
Quizzing - Formative quiz questions were added, using the characters to personalize the interaction.
FUTURE
On my next iteration with this content, I would consider making the following changes:
Make a story - How do these topics relate to one another? Use the character to tell a story throughout.
Design - Find a way to create more white space, especially on the celestial sphere interactive.
Gamify - Add additional quizzes and give the learner points for each correct response. Embed this into an LMS using SCORM to log results.
Scenario based - As part of the story, students would face a real decision and the consequences of that decision. This might include navigational decisions on a trip using the celestial sphere coordinates.
Multimedia - Add audio of the character speaking and perhaps high quality video of the parallax experiment.
Converting a boring slide set can really update your course or training materials into a modern eLearning experience. What are your favorite tips and tricks in converting slides to an eLearning course?