Tuesday, January 20, 2015

We ARE The eLearning Police.

My friend , former colleague and now President at CCASTD (now ATDChi) Greg Owen-Boger just placed a great post on LinkedIn entitled 'We are not the PowerPoint Police' about people wanting rules on how to create PowerPoint slides.

One of the paragraphs that got me thinking said this.

We like to think of PowerPoint as a tool to provide structure and to trigger the presenter’s thoughts. You are your presentation, not the slides. Use them to guide you through the presentation, rather than BEING the presentation. It will make your life easier. It will make the task of following you easier as well.

But what about when the presentation is ALL there is. And by that I mean what if we have no live presenter to have thoughts triggered by a PowerPoint but instead have a piece of Self-paced eLearning.

In my opinion that means the focus has to change. Now instead of looking to trigger the presenter's thoughts on content they already know intimately, we are trying to trigger the learner's questions on content they probably don't know that well at all.

Regular readers will recall that I recently managed to persuade some folks at my client that they didn't want me to create 'a 2 page pamphlet' for something but instead they let me create a multi-layer stand alone piece in Storyline. The driving force behind this was to give the reader the option of how far they wanted to delve into each of the areas being explored. From a single sentence on the top screen to multiple page explanations with accompanying videos if they choose to go that deep.

I hope that doing it this way triggers their questions.

I know it is a better option that the '2 page pamphlet'

Happy New Year and
Happy Learning

Alan

No comments:

Post a Comment