Learning PowerPoint online

One of the most common scenarios for rapid elearning developers is to take an existing PowerPoint presentation and convert it to an “elearning course.” Sometimes you get the luxury of meeting with the subject matter expert and then reworking the content to transform it from a presentation to an elearning course. However, there are many times when you have to take the content “as is” and then put it online. The subject matter expert’s not too interested in reworking the content much.

Cathy Moore’s Dump the Drone presentation is a good example of the type of presentation a client might ask you to convert and put online. There’s really nothing wrong with Cathy’s version, but I asked her if I could use it for this post because as Elaine Bettis would say, “It’s blog-worthy.” The content is great and I don’t have to come up with a fake presentation.

So here’s Cathy’s slide show that she gave as a conference presentation.

Click here to see the original slideshow.

Now, check out the demo I did using the Dump the Drone slides. What I did was take Cathy’s PowerPoint slides as if she were the subject matter expert and then applied different treatments to them. The idea here is not to convert Cathy’s slides verbatim. Instead I want to take you on a tour of different ways you can treat the slides that you get from your client. If this was a real course (and not a demo) I wouldn’t use all of these ideas together. I’d select a look and feel that was consistent throughout the course. This is just intended to give you some ideas to play with.

There’s more than one way to create your slides.

Just because you get a bullet point slide show doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Feel free to change the look and feel of the slides. Look at the images below, they represent the different looks used in the demo.