PowerPoint

One of our newer instructional designers was feeling frustrated with a project he was working on. “They want to use POWERPOINT,” he spat, as if he’d just uttered a dirty word.

“What’s wrong with PowerPoint?” I asked mildly. He looked at me as if I’d just grown a pair of antlers. “What’s wrong with it? Everybody knows PowerPoint isn’t good for eLearning.” he sounded surprised that he had to explain this very simple and widely-embraced concept to me.

It’s amazing how many otherwise rational and competent eLearning instructional designers steer their clients away from PowerPoint without giving it a thought. There’s a lot of natural bias against PowerPoint in the eLearning community, often for very valid reasons, but sometimes not. PowerPoint can be a very useful tool in the correct circumstances.

To understand why the eLearning community tends to shun Powerpoint as an authoring tool we have to go back to the beginning. PowerPoint was developed to give presenters the ability to create their own lecture aids. Before the days of PowerPoint (can any of us remember back that far?) presenters who didn’t have access to graphic illustrators were reduced to using transparencies, pretty color magic markers, and whatever art skills they picked up in sixth grade. And woe upon him whose audience asked for a copy! Those transparencies didn’t go through the ditto machine too well. Fortunately in those days, the success of the presentation relied on the presenter and not his supporting aids.

There begins the eLearning instructional designer’s issues with PowerPoint: PowerPoint was developed to support presenters, not replace them. And therein lies the first problem with PowerPoint as eLearning: Historically, content is either incomplete, or incompletely explained.

eLearning is marvelous. When done correctly it captures what Resource Bridge calls “The Instructor Element” which simply put means capturing those factors that an instructor brings to a class. One of the biggest factors is the ability to engage the learner. That brings us to PowerPoint problem #2: The limitations of PowerPoint make it inherently unengaging. PowerPoint conveys knowledge, but enables minimal reinforcement and requires no proof of user retention.

So far, sounds like my newbie instructional designer had a good point. Confused? Perhaps to our unenlightened competitors, who look no further than their canned solutions to solve their clients’ problems. Let’s now talk about the client in question.

This particular client is a small not-for-profit company that is doing some amazing work in educating Physicians on rehabilitating children with a certain disease. The research they are doing is updated constantly, and their audience is literally all over the world. Ok, so what have I told you in those few short sentences that is important to their eLearning deployment?

• Audience is dispersed
• Content is dynamic
• Learner type is Physician (limited, dedicated continuing education time)
• Client has limited funding

These factors taken together actually lend themselves well to PowerPoint. Why is that? Let’s talk about some of the benefits of eLearning through PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is inexpensive
Most people can at least put together text based PowerPoint themselves. PowerPoint is pretty easy to use, and with a little practice users can add movement, audio, graphics: all without outside help.

PowerPoint is fast
The right LMS can convert PowerPoint into eLearning and deploy it instantly. One of the most well-known is Macromedia Breeze; but it comes with inherent limitations and a hefty price tag. We recommend ExceLearn LMS. For as little as $5 per seat, users can upload PowerPoints and convert them to eLearning. ExceLearn also contains a pretty nifty built-in assessment feature. Regardless of how it is deployed, dynamic, critical content calls for faster implementations than a traditional eLearning development cycle can generally accommodate, and PowerPoint lends itself well to rapid design and deployment.

PowerPoint is no-frills
Uh……is this a benefit? Absolutely! (I see eLearning instructional designers all over the country passing out cold.) Let me explain. We all know that learner groups have common characteristics. As I’ve mentioned, Physicians tend to be a get-to-the-point community. This is a group of people who are very used to learning. That is to say, they can glean information in any situation; whether instructor-led, health journal, diagnostics books, seminars presented by other Physicians (not necessarily known for their dynamic presentation skills), etc. Physicians are professional learners: they OWN their learning process, they know how to assimilate content, and they have neither the time nor the inclination to mess with redundant or time-consuming learning treatments. Compare them to, say, an audience of call center representatives. These folks tend not to have college degrees; many have not graduated from high school. This is a community of people who have not honed their learning skills, and so they benefit from instant remediation, learning treatments, reinforcement and assessment pathing. Which of these two audiences will respond best to the content-intensive, no-frills presentation style of PowerPoint? Our Physicians.
With these factors in mind, PowerPoint is a quite credible option for our not-for-profit client. So why is it that most of our competitors would strongly discourage its use? There are three main reasons:

Ignorance
First is a lack of understanding the client’s needs, usually due to an incomplete analysis at the start of the project. Without learning what a customer really needs to accomplish, together with that client’s requirements/objectives/limitations/environment/audience demographics, etc., many eLearning development firms will recommend whatever solution they are typically comfortable with deploying.

eLearning as Art
Second, we have our eLearning Purists. These are those people who believe that Narrow is the Road to Real eLearning, and Few are the Developers Who Will Enter by the eLearning Gate! (I could name an analyst or two who falls into this category….). The problem we have here is that these people are under the misconception that eLearning is itself the objective. To those eLearning Purists, news flash: eLearning is a means to acheiving an objective, not the objective itself! The real purpose of eLearning (as with any learning intervention strategy) is to transfer the knowledge that the user needs in order to successfully perform whatever is the company’s ultimate objective.

$$$
Third, we have the worst group of all. These are the eLearning development vendors who put their bottom line above the needs of the client. There’s no money for them if the client develops its eLearning in PowerPoint. If they can talk the client out of it….cha-ching! They sometimes try to convince their client that the more expensive the solution, the better it must work. Not true. Not true at all.

The bottom line
If you are working with an outsource eLearning development company who is steering you away from PowerPoint, listen to them: they may have a good reason. But do make it your business to know that it has more to do with meeting your company’s objectives….and less to do with meeting their sales quota.

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