I've done more than my fair share of PowerPoint-bashing in the past. And with good reason. Because there's no getting away from it. Misuse of PowerPoint is responsible for some truly awful e-learning content. 

But today, I want to present a more balanced view of PowerPoint's plus and minus points.

Because the fact of the matter is, e-learning created using PowerPoint doesn't have to be awful. When used well, PowerPoint can be a very versatile tool.

PowerPoint sits somewhere in between a free-form rapid authoring tool and a form-based one. And this is its great strength. 

If it's a familiar tool to you already, it wouldn't take that much extra time or effort to learn its more advanced features. This would give you the option to build graphics, audio and animations onto your slides, as well as linking those slides in a non-linear sequence.

So PowerPoint's big strength? You can achieve quite a lot without any specific programming knowledge, but you have more freedom than if you were using a form-based authoring tool. 

If that all sounds like too much trouble, quite a few authoring tools allow you to create a basic framework of slides in PowerPoint, import them into the authoring tool and develop something more sophisticated from there. However, this approach comes with a big health warning. Plenty of really bad e-learning has been produced this way, too.

Which brings me to the other side of the argument. Because PowerPoint is so widely used and because its basic features are relatively easy to learn, lots of people with little or no instructional design knowledge or experience end up 'designing' e-learning courses. In many cases, very, very badly.

This is made worse because many of these courses started off as (bad) presentations. They hardly get altered in their transition to 'e-learning' and so end their life as truly dreadful online slide shows which consist of nothing more than slides of text, brightened up by a few cheesy graphics here and there.

If you care about creating effective e-learning that improves performance, it's easy to hate or demonise PowerPoint.  And in demonising PowerPoint, it's also easy to lose sight of the real problem which is not the tool, but the lack of instructional design knowledge and experience of the people using it. 

So the perennial challenge is not so much about how to get better at using the tools themselves (although that's important). The challenge is how to apply good instructional design while using those tools.

Get the balance right and you can create quality e-learning that embeds knowledge and skills and improves performance over time.

Our Creating Boredom-Busting E-Learning modules focus on e-learning instructional design, not the point and click of the authoring tool. Take a day or two out of your schedule to dramatically shift the way you think about e-learning.

Go round any learning technology-focused trade show or exhibition and you  won't be able to move for them. Who am I talking about? The sharp-suited sales people hanging around on those flashy, expensive stands, of course. 

These are the people promoting their latest rapid e-learning application. You know, the one that's going to help you build e-learning courses in no time at all, with no required programming. All your e-learning problems will be solved. All your Christmases will come at once.

When money's tight and everyone is finding it harder to make a buck, the promise of rapid e-learning is a deeply attractive one. Especially if you are the stressed L&D professional constantly trying to achieve more for less.

But what is rapid e-learning exactly? Is it an urban myth? And if it does exist, does it actually improve learning and performance? 

Put a bunch of e-learning practitioners together in a room and I'm not convinced they'd be able to come up with a definition of rapid e-learning they could all agree with. But let's live dangerously and see what we can come up with here.

For some people rapid e-learning is all about the software. In a software-driven paradigm, it's all about tools that allow just about anyone to create and publish e-learning courses with little or no programming knowledge. It's about the change from the early days of e-learning when you needed significant programming skills to achieve anything of worth.

For others, rapid e-learning is defined by the ease of the production process. In this view of rapid e-learning, just one or two people can wear many hats. Gone are the days of huge development teams and endless production cycles.

Whatever your definition, rapid e-learning needs an authoring tool of some description. And broadly speaking, development tools fall into two broad categories: free-form and form-based.

Free form: the name gives it away, really. Free form tools start with a blank screen which allows the e-learning author to create a structure s/he wants. Inevitably, this still requires some setting-up and choosing functionality.

Form-based: in a form-based authoring tool, the software does pretty much everything. All you have to do is add the content. The negative here, of course, is the forms. They only give you what they are designed to. If you want anything outside of this, you are back to needing programming skills.

But whatever tool you use (whether you consider it 'rapid' or not), there's no getting away from one central question: Just because you can create a course rapidly, should you? And one central problem: not everyone given an authoring tool (and the training to operate it) is going to develop a great course. In fact many will (and have) built truly awful ones.

The answer to the 'should you' question has to be answered by individual organisations. Only people in that organisation can best work out if e-learning is really the most suitable solution for them.

In answer to the second point, I'd say this. When the technology is new and exciting, all the focus is on the technology. This has been the problem with e-learning for too long now. 

In the software-driven paradigm I mentioned earlier, rapid e-learning was meant to democratise development. In many cases, all it did was empower lots of people to create online slideshows with little or no value or effectiveness. 

But now we seem to be moving into an era when technology is evolving again. It probably won't be that long before almost no programming skills are required to create sophisticated e-learning

For me, this moment can't come fast enough.  This could be the moment when we can finally shift from what I call 'point and click' thinking to instructional design thinking. Finally we can shift the focus to where it's needed to be all along:  not about how to programme, but about how to build better courses and more effective learning experiences.

If Articulate Storyline is your 'rapid' e-learning authoring tool and you need some training for yourself or your team, take a look at our in-house training options.

Before Christmas I posted on LinkedIn about how many of our clients often vent their frustrations about their existing LMS.

I mentioned that we have been having our own LMS growing pains and promised an update on this. 

As small business, our LMS is primarily about providing access to learning materials for our clients, rather than internally for ourselves. So our need for an e-commerce element is greater than for many. 

The companies that I would call legacy corporate LMS providers tend to have a basic e-commerce offering and almost always go with the conventional pricing model of charging per user account (sometimes combining that with restrictions on the number of courses you can upload).

None of these mainstream offerings really suited our particular needs, so we started casting a broader net. Which has resulted in us settling on a Wordpress-based LMS plug-in.

We have run our website using Hubspot for the best part of 15 years now, so Wordpress was not a product/community we had any first-hand experience of. 

Now I’ve had some exposure to Wordpress, my view is that the core Wordpress software is a clunky old dog that doesn’t exactly provide a winning user interface.

However, if you can get over that poor back-end usability issue, you find yourself in an astonishingly innovative marketplace of plug-ins and extensions, all offering a huge variety of add-on functionality.

Like any thriving marketplace, there’s the good and the bad and we certainly test-drove a couple of horrible LMS plug-ins before settling on the one we did.

Is our chosen option completely perfect? No. Has it been a project and a half to get it to do (more or less) exactly what we want? Absolutely. Will it be a massive improvement for us on what we have been using up until now? Most definitely. Have we avoided our very own LMS boondoggle? Thankfully, yes.

Which, I think, verifies the point made by one of the commenters on my LinkedIn post. That is, that LMS needs vary dramatically from business to business. So just because one LMS works well for business A, it might be the worst possible LMS solution for business B.

In other words, unless you are super-clear about what you need to achieve with your LMS, you may well end up with a solution that you are cursing, not far down the line.

That’s why, you’ll notice, that I haven’t named any names in this post. Given how much needs can vary, it seems very unfair to publicly call out products that may not have been suitable for us but could be perfect for you.

If you are interested in talking with me more about our Wordpress LMS experience or the specific products we tested, I’m happy to do this offline.

This Articulate Storyline training blog post, fouses on Storyline’s freeform interactions.

But you may not know that totally flexible versions of these interactions are also available – and only a mouse click away.

These flexible freeform interactions completely transform your ability to create really authentic, context sensitive activities that are a world away from their pre-formatted siblings.

And knowing about these freeform interactions is crucial if you want to produce more authentic, task-based e-learning. Why? Because, by definition, the pre-formatted variety can only ever be about an abstract style of practice activity.

By contrast, freeform interactions are only about the functionality. It’s entirely up to you how you apply that functionality. In other words, you have complete freedom in how your interaction looks and what skills or knowledge it gets your learners to practice.

Suddenly (provided you are prepared to think a bit differently about your e-learning) you can use the interactions’ functionality to make your practice activity seem authentic and meaningful to your learners.

And by the way, if you need some help in thinking differently about your e-learning, check out a free 12 page boredom-busting e-learning guide here.

Freeform interaction benefits

So what about other benefits of using freeform interactions? Crucially, they allow you start with the instructional idea.

What is it you ideally want to create to help your learners get authentic practice in the skills you are teaching?

You can sketch the idea out, share it with others, get their feedback and then refine it a bit. Only then do you need to think about which of the interaction type will best help you to achieve your goal.

This is in complete contrast to the pre-formatted variety of interaction, where you are simply having to fit your content into a pre-existing approach, format and layout. Little or no creativity, authenticity or context. Highly abstract for the learners. Very dry. Extremely predictable.

Using freeform interactions: in summary

Just to recap, you start with your idea. Sketch it out and (where possible) share this with your colleagues and some candidate learners to get feedback and refine the idea.

Create the idea either as a standard Storyline slide or in an external tool such as PowerPoint and then import the content into Storyline.

With your slide all ready to go, choose the Freeform Interactions button in the XX menu. From the list that of interactions available, choose the one suitable for your needs.

Set the interaction’s functionality as required for your activity. Remember you van toggle between the slide view and the interaction’s back end form view as much as you need.

Once all the settings are complete, test your interaction.

So in summary, freeform interactions give you all the kind of e-learning interactions you know and love already – they simply provide you with a powerful, new way to apply them to your learning

This article first appeared on the Training Zone website.

In the previous Articulate Storylline training blog post, I explained what Storyline variables are and why they are so important. I also wrote about the three types of variables available for you to use.

In this blog post, there's a video which takes a look at an example of creating one of these three types of variables – a text variable: 

In summary, then, variables give you the power and flexibility to start thinking about how you can link you design across an entire course and break free of the restrictions of just designing on a slide-by-slide basis.

This video was first published as part of an article on the Training Zone website.

In some ways, this is not surprising. They are invisible to the learners (so don’t make for very glossy website visuals). They are a little bit abstract (not an easy thing for light and fluffy marketing types to get their heads around). And learning to use them takes a bit of concentration and effort (not exactly a great sell if you’re trying to persuade prospective clients that creating e-learning is quick and easy).

Which is a pity. Because one of Storyline’s greatest assets barely gets a mention most of the time.

Why variables are so important

So what are these things called variables? Before I explain that it’s worth mentioning why they might be so spectacularly useful and important.

 Most of what people focus on when they are creating e-learning with Storyline happens at slide level.

 In other words, you are using tools and features to control elements on a specific, individual slide. Of course, this is really important. The more functionality and control you have over what happens on an individual slide (or one of its layers) the better.

But imagine if you want to control what happens between slides. What about if your instructional design thinking is moving beyond a slide-by-slide focus. What about if you want to design your course in such a way that what a learner does on slide 5 has an impact on what they can do or what they can see on slide 25, for example?

This is where variables come into their own. Because variables operate at a global level within your Storyline course. They are available to you at any point in your course from any slide. 

Variables explained

So what are they exactly? Well, first of all, there are three types: text; number and true/ false. Think of the first two as containers and the third as a switch you can flick on and off.

As the name suggests, text variables allow you to store and retrieve a piece of text the learners type into it. Number variables allow you to store and retrieve a number or changing numbers that are relevant to your course. True/False variables can be set to equal one of two different values. It will come as no great shock to discover that the values you can switch between are (you guessed it) true and false!

If this is all still a bit, too conceptual for you, let’s take a look at a simple example of how you might use each one. 

Text variables in action

Let’s start with text variables. We all love it when something is “all about us”. Making something about us – personalisation – always goes down well. This is just as true for a piece of learning as for anything.

So a text variable is a great way to personalise your piece of learning. First you create your text variable and give it a name. At the start of a course, you can ask learners to type their name into a special text field. This automatically stores whatever name they type in the field inside the text variable you created.

While the course is running, this piece of text (in this example, the learners’ name) is available to you at any time on any slide – you just need to retrieve it.

So, for example, instead of an instruction on a screen saying, “Please select the best response”, it could say “Debbie, please select the best response” (assuming Debbie was the learner’s name).

When you create the text box with this instruction in it, you would just make sure you insert the name of your text variable at the start of the sentence. This way, you are telling Storyline to retrieve what’s stored in that variable and display it at the start of the sentence. 

This means you could pepper your course with personalised references to the learner using the learner name stored in the variable. Note that once the course is finished, the name stored in the variable is lost, so if the learner returned to the course a second time, they would have to type their name again at the very beginning. 

Number variables in action

Similarly, number variables can store a number, retrieve it and display it at any point. You can also add, subtract, divide and multiply any numbers stored in your number variable.

So you might, for example, want to keep track of the number of times a learner clicks on a particular button on a slide and when they reach a pre-defined number of clicks either show them a specific piece of content on that slide or take them to another slide. 

True/false variables in action

Finally, as previously mentioned, true/false variables act as a kind of switch. You can choose to start the ‘switch’ at either true or false. When the learner does something (like click on a button) you could set their action to flick the ‘switch’ to the opposite of its starting point (i.e. from false to true or from true to false).

When the learner reaches a slide later in the course, you might decide to show one piece of content on the slide if the variable ‘switch’ is set to false and a different piece of content if the variable ‘switch’ has been flicked to true.

In conclusion

In summary, then, variables give you the power and flexibility to start thinking about how you can link you design across an entire course and break free of the restrictions of just designing on a slide-by-slide basis.

This article was first published on the Training Zone website.

In the previous post on this blog about Articulate Storyline training, I wrote about Storyline masters and layouts, their uses and how they are different from templates.

There's also a short video to help explain the concept.

Below you can watch another short video showing masters and layouts in action:

If you'd like to watch more short videos providing training on Articulate's Storyline application, go to our YouTube channel.

This video first appeared as part of an article on the Training Zone  website.

Many people are familiar with the idea of a software template. This is a great way of providing some pre-existing structure for the creation of documents, PowerPoint presentations or pieces of e-learning.

And like many authoring tools, Storyline has template functionality, allowing you to create a high degree of consistency in how your courses look and function. In short, templates get plenty of attention – for very good reasons. 

However, software features that get lots of attention aren’t necessarily the only (or the best) way to achieve your goals. Many people using templates might be better off using a Storyline feature which tends to be overshadowed by templates: namely masters and layouts. 

Spot the difference

So what’s the difference between the two features and why would you bother with masters and layouts when you’ve already got templates to help you.

The key thing to remember about a Storyline template? It’s a way to save and share ALL elements of a Storyline project. When you decide to save a project (large or small) as a template, absolutely every element of that project is saved within the template – not only content, but also things like triggers, navigation, variables etc.

So you would use a template when you want to save the exact structure and functionality of your project. When you want to lock-down design and restrict flexibility. When you want to provide a complete course blueprint that others can work from. In short, templates are an easy and robust way of sharing a complete project and all its elements.

But what about if you like the idea of being able to create some time-saving consistency, but still need a reasonable degree of flexibility in how you create and populate slides within your project.

If this sounds like your goal, then masters and layouts may well be a better option for you than a template.

Masters and layouts explained

You’ve probably heard of a master slide and may already be clear about it’s function. But its likely you’ll be less clear about layouts and their function. So before we go any further here’s a quick video for you to watch explaining exactly what masters and layouts are all about. 

As you will have gathered from the video above, a master slide and its associated layouts provide an easy way to consistently set the placement of slide content and then apply it to selected slides within your course.

Let’s just take a minute to review masters slides first, followed by layouts

All about master slides

Master slides are great for any global content that needs to appear on every slide in your course. A master slide can save you going through your course and manually putting the same pieces of content onto every slide. And because the content on a master slide is managed centrally, the placement of that content will be precise and consistent throughout your course.

So master slides are extremely useful, but a little bit limiting. The reason for this? There is probably not that much identical content that will need to appear on every single slide of your course.

However, it’s quite likely that you will have quite a bit of identical content that does need to appear on certain individual slides, say, or all the slides in a specific scene. 

All about layouts

That’s why you can add layouts below your master slide. The real power of the master slide comes with its associated layouts. Layouts give you targeted control over and flexibility with the content that needs to appear on a given individual slide or slides in a scene.

It should come as no surprise, then that planning is the key to success with both masters and layouts. To get their real benefit, you need to have your course well planned out in advance, so you are clear from the word go which pieces of content will consistently need to appear where.

Some extra points to remember

There are a couple of other important points to make here. The first is that masters and layouts are not just about the consistent placement of content. You can also add triggers to the content on your masters and layouts making this functionality available on selected slides as well.

The second point is about the flexibility I mentioned earlier. Even when you have applied a master or layout to a slide, you can still add more content, triggers or layers to that individual slide.

So you’ll often end up with individual slides which are a flexible combination of preformatted content and triggers drawn from a master and its layouts and content and triggers which are specific to just that individual slide.

In summary, if what you need is flexibility and creativity and not the locked-down, restrictive approach that templates are designed to achieve, then masters and layouts are likely to be for you.

This article first appeared on the Training Zone website.

Increasingly, if you are working in a learning and development role associated with designing and developing e-learning, you’ll probably be expected to have some ability in using an authoring tool.

This should be good a thing. It increases your overall skill set and more important, it enables you to create more effective learning for your learners.

But what about if this isn’t what is happening. What about if your e-learning authoring tool is actually holding you back?

This might seem like an odd question to ask. Surely an ability to use an authoring tool will mean you are creating really effective e-learning. Not necessarily.

First, it’s your instructional design skills that should determine the effectiveness and quality of the e-learning you create.

But what about if you are not going down the road your instructional design leads you because you find yourself thinking, “No point in doing that because I’ve no idea how to implement it in my authoring tool. Better stick with a less ambitious design because I know how to do that.”

Hey presto, before you know it, your authoring tool is most definitely holding you back. The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way.

The problem with legacy authoring tools

Going back 10 or 15 years, most easy-to-use authoring tools were so limited in their functionality, they really restricted truly creative instructional design thinking.

Only if you were lucky enough to work in an organisation with a massive budget for creating e-learning and unrestricted access to programmers could you really pull off much that was original or really effective.

This is one of the key reasons we have had years of deathly boring e-learning. Lots of slides with dense text and stock photos. A Back and Next button applied to each slide – and not much else.

The emerging new breed of tools

Fortunately, the world of authoring tools is changing. While there are still far too many rubbish ones out there, we are seeing a new breed emerge. Much more powerful. Fantastic functionality. Much fewer limits on what you can achieve with your e-learning.

So here’s the rub. Lots of people using one of these new style of authoring tools don’t really know about some of the more powerful features available to them. Instead they are still churning out e-learning, barely removed from the deathly dull variety just described above.

What a pity! This is like owning a Porsche and only ever driving it around your local neighbourhood at about 20 miles an hour.

Getting the most from your authoring tool

So what’s the solution? Well, it’s twofold. First, you really need to make sure your instructional design thinking is up-to-date and fit for creating e-learning that is more focused on delivering practice of skills, than delivering screens of knowledge.

And, by the way, if you need some help with this, you can download a free 12 page guide to creating boredom-busting e-learning here.

Second, it’s time to up your game and start learning about the more powerful features of your authoring tool.

To help you with this, I’ll be writing three more articles focused around one of the most popular of this new breed of authoring tool, Articulate’s Storyline.

Why focus on Storyline?

Why the focus on Storyline? It may not be absolutely the most sophisticated and capable of all the tools out there, but it does offer a great balance between being relatively easy to learn and achieving well above average functionality and interaction.

In each of the articles that follow this one, I’ll be focusing on a different Storyline feature. Features that you’ve quite possibly heard of or maybe even used a little.

But you may not be aware of their real power and how they can help you create much more effective e-learning. Features which can really help liberate your instructional design thinking and save your learners from the boredom of endless knowledge presentation.

The best bit of all this? Once you feel confident in your ability to get your authoring tool to implement your instructional design ideas, it really will be your instructional design thinking that drives your development and not your authoring tool.

This will almost certainly make your role as an instructional designer more interesting and satisfying. It will also turn you into an e-learning hero in the eyes of your learners. Don’t underestimate how much they will thank you for NOT making them sit through hours and hours of dull, sleep-inducing e-learning!

This article first appeared on the Training Zone website.