How to convert PowerPoint to eLearning

Are you stuck in PowerPoint mode?

When you or your colleagues are authoring an e-learning course, do you feel the need to create a slide-by-slide PowerPoint presentation? Perhaps you’re even migrating actual PowerPoint presentations into your e-learning platform?

These might seem like logical things to do. After all, we’ve all been to countless training sessions where a trainer clicks through slides of a PowerPoint presentation while giving a lecture. PowerPoint is great for a one-sided presentation, where a speaker does all the talking. But it’s not the right tool to use to engage learners. Engagement requires interactivity and a degree of learner autonomy so that learners take an active role and acquire knowledge organically at their own pace.

It’s also very important to avoid overloading your learners with content. PowerPoint often involves lots of text and information on each slide. This is a big turn-off if you’re trying to keep your learner’s attention.

Going from PowerPoint to e-learning

If you want learners to acquire the information you’re sharing with them, the most effective way is to use interactive, engaging methods. For example, quiz questions, bite-sized nuggets of microlearning content, and instant feedback supplied automatically in response to the learner’s actions.

Modern e-learning platforms like Easygenerator offer these options. They make the learning process engaging and effective. While training with PowerPoint can often feel like a passive experience for learners, acquiring knowledge through interactive e-learning software is usually perceived as much more fun and engaging. That’s precisely the kind of learning experience that you want to provide to ensure your learners get the most out of the training experience.

How to convert PowerPoint for e-learning?

The key to shedding old PowerPoint habits is to create courses in the right order. The correct order for writing any e-learning course, whether you’re using Easygenerator or want to convert PowerPoint for e-learning, should be as follows:

• Define your learning objectives
• Formulate assessments
• Create content

1. Defining learning objectives

Before you sit down and start writing pages of text about the training topic, focus on what you want to achieve. Ask yourself: what new knowledge or skills should the learner acquire by taking this e-learning course? Be as specific and realistic about the objectives as possible. The more precise, the better.

If you’re having a hard time coming up with clear learning objectives, read the tips in our article about how to use learning objectives. The Easygenerator Learning Objective Maker will also help you define clear, high-impact learning objectives, based on Bloom’s Taxonomy.

2. Formulating assessments

Once you know your learning objectives, use them to guide you towards the kind of assessment you want your learners to answer. After all, completing an assessment is the best way for the learner to demonstrate that he or she has acquired the expected knowledge or skills.

Often, the assessment will be in the form of a test. That means the learner will need to either answer questions or perform an action correctly to demonstrate he or she has gained the necessary knowledge or skill. Focusing on your learning objectives for the course, think of what the learner will need to do successfully to show that they now have the knowledge or skill you’re trying to teach them.

3. Creating content

Now you’re ready to create the content. Ensure that it clearly states the learning objectives from the beginning and is explicitly geared towards completing the assessment. By limiting your content only to that specific information, you’re sure to avoid PowerPoint-style cognitive overload and achieve the learning objectives you set out to achieve. If you do still use PowerPoint, this is a way to convert it more to e-learning.

Read our full guide to learn how to convert PowerPoint to e-learning.

Convert PowerPoint to e-learning and create an interactive learning experience

Now that you know the right steps to follow, you’re ready to move beyond passive, content-heavy PowerPoint-style training and convert your courses to interactive, effective e-learning. And with a user-friendly authoring tool like Easygenerator, you and the experts in your company will be turning out high-quality, engaging e-learning content in no time