What Do We Really Mean? PowerPoint on Steriods

22 Jan What Do We Really Mean? PowerPoint on Steriods

First of “What Do We Really Mean”? Series

One of the challenges of different industries working together involves vocabulary and pet phrases. The learning design and development “trade” is no different.  So we will be blogging over the next 30 days a few of the key concepts that we use in our conversations with our clients (both internal and external).

Today:  “PowerPoint on Steroids”

I use this phrase constantly when trying to explain to people that elearning is NOT PowerPoint. And I always get a laugh and shake of the head in agreement. But yet when I work with our clients I still find some confusion and the result is screens that resemble a PowerPoint presentation.

And here in lies the difference. While many people think I mean just the design of the screens…lots of bullets and dense text…I really mean much more than that. PowerPoint was designed to guide a facilitator through their presentation. Two key words — guide and facilitator. PowerPoint is meant to support a facilitator as they guide their participants toward learning goals.

Self-study (asynchnronous) e-learning should be designed to support the learner as they move towards their learning goals. This means that the screens becomes the guide using text, narration, images etc. So the design of each screen must consider what is going to maintain my attention, focus the learning using small enough “chunks” that the learner does not become overwhelmed (i.e. don’t overload my working memory) and can retain and transfer to long-term memory.

Another topic for another day is “visual” design and what that means.