Let’s admit it: PowerPoint has become the preferred tool of many instructional designers—but is not very popular with graphic designers. So let’s check out some cool features of PowerPoint 2007 that allow you to have a better handle of the graphic quality of your presentations and e-learning created using Articulate Presenter.

Use Guidelines for Consistent Layout
All graphic design softwares allow designers to insert guidelines that divide the layout into identifiable parts and help alignment of objects. Not many PowerPoint users are aware that you can display guidelines in PowerPoint too. If you are aware that guidelines can be displayed, chances are that you don’t really know how to multiply them.

Here’s trick—right click the slide, and select Grid and Guides… and under Guide Settings choose to display guides on the slide. This part is easy and intuitively known to many PowerPoint users. However, most PowerPoint users end up using just to two default guides that intersect at the center of the slide. To create another guide, press CTRL, drag a guide, and then release the CTRL key.  Now you can position your drawing guides to create a uniform layout across many slides in your presentation.

Copy Shapes and Paste as Images
If you’ve been using Articulate Presenter, you probably find converting the shapes into images a bit arduous. Well, there’s a short cut that can save you the trouble of saving the picture and then inserting it again into the PowerPoint. Just copy the shape and do a Paste Special from the Clipboard menu. You get options to save the image as PNG, GIF, JPEG, and Microsoft Drawing Object.

 This shortcut can not only save you time, it can help you better your production process. Once a final image is available from the graphic designer, you can right-click the earlier picture and select Change Picture. Your animations and your voiceover synchronizations stay intact.

Decrop Images if You Can’t Increase the Bounding Box
Often you published your presentation in Articulate Presenter, the images especially the one with round edges get blurred at the edge. It is suggested that you increase the bounding box of such images. That may not be possible if you did not create the objects in software such as Illustrator or Corel.

 One easy way out to eliminate this shortcoming is to assign a uniform negative cropping to the image. Right click the image and select Size and Position. In the Size tab, insert negative values in the Crop from field.

Add Transparency to Images
One of the most common complaints I get from designers is about not being able to add transparency to images in PowerPoint. You could assign the Transparency custom animation and maintain it throughout the slide duration.

 Alternatively, you could create a shape of exactly the same size as the image, fill the shape with the picture, and adjust the transparency.

Organize Slide Objects Using the Selection Pane
As you get used to using the custom animation pane more and more, you will notice that the number of objects that you are dealing with gets larger and larger.

The Selection Pane, which is available under the Arrange menu is a big help. Not only does it allow you control the layering and visibility, it allows you to uniquely name each object. Naming each object makes it so much easier to animate the slide than animating Shape 1, Oval 3 and so on. Uniquely naming objects also reduces the chance of the animation getting skewed when published using Articulate Presenter.
Click the link below to view a demo of how to use the selection pane:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA102557111033.aspx

When Edward Tufte wrote “Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure,” in his essay on evils of PowerPoint, the elearning design and development community turned its ears elsewhere saying, “We got our media theory correct from research findings.” Well, did we?

PowerPoint is an important tool when it comes to design of elearning. For one, it is used to storyboard for many custom elearning projects and second, many rapid elearning development tools convert PowerPoint source files into elearning output. So one cannot but dodge the Tufte critique by saying our output files are different, so long as your design boards are created in PowerPoint. What’s it that Tufte is criticizing? How can a tool or its functionality be evil? Are we forgetting something about the human thinking and brain here?

Visualize. VISUALIZE. That’s what most elearning designers’ end up doing and thinking that’s their rightful duty. Visuals add “spunk” to engage your learners, you are told. Now take a civilizational perspective of development of language (text and audio) that you seek to embed in your elearning.

Most early scripts of language were pictorial and they slowly graduated to become the abstract symbol treasure trove they are today. It has been an excruciatingly long journey for the human race to understand “meaning” through abstract symbols. Today most communication happens via the use of these abstract symbols (scripts and sounds).

What’s the point? It is neither required nor desirable to always include imagery. Designers need to understand the text is also a visual media capable of being translated into silent audio and unsupplied images by the adult learners’ brain as it is being read.

Most slide designs and layouts fall out with the design principles when  designers forget that text is a visual media.  Often literal visualizations can lead to reinventing  pictorial scripts that human race improved in the preceding millenniums.

That leads us to ask: what categories of text can qualify to be treated as an image?
Headings
For their signaling effect, design and layout needs to pay attention to the title of the screen or slide, the sub-headings, and stem sentences of lists. A hierarchy of fonts is critical to signaling and tagging information.
Labels
For their classification effect, greater attention needs to be paid to labels. Remember it is the label that indisputably denotes the function of a graphic or image. Labels are more important if the image is not a concrete but is an abstract representation.
Bullets
For their capability to chunk information, you may want to sub-categorize the bullets. Especially, if you have a list of more than 5 items. (Why 5? This constraint is derived from Miller’s rule that human short-term memory capacity ranges from 5 to 9 items.) If you have longer lists, you may also want provide emphasis on the items in the middle of the list (first and last items are remembered better).
Numbers
Numbers or measurability is an important argument in maintaining the objectivity of information. However, not all numbers are equally important. Moreover, it is the trend and the pattern that the mind searches when presented with a maze of numbers.
Tables
Tabulating information helps the learner compare and contrast data. Many designers stick to tables only for numbers and forget that it is principally a comparison tool that applies to words as well. Also, many designers fall into the trap of imaging all data available in numbers when sometimes the table is the most appropriate visualization.

Additionally, in interactive design of elearning—the question, decision points, and feedback are all important contenders for text-that-needs-to-be-treated-like-a-graphic category.

The promise of rapid elearning has for many ended up with a deluge of page turners. What went wrong? Many training honchos thought SMEs could learn the tools in a day and then they could eliminate an entire industry of instructional design out of the production process. So most rapid elearning ended up without instructional design and more importantly, without industrious design.

Page turners, by definition, are devoid of activities-practice and assessments. Without activities, learners miss out the feedback loop of interactive communication. Minus the practice activities, learning is at the mercy of the Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting and the only way memory decay can be staved off is by regular repetition or the old school rote memorization.

When instructional designers create page turners, they do more than just create presentations. For many, the fashionable-to-deride Click Next is a turn-the-page signal. For the discerning designer, it is the least minimum divisor of curriculum structure and sequence.

Of all the clicks a learner will make, Click Next is the most empowering as it links information consumed with information awaited. This link also seeks to replicate itself in the information hierarchy developing the learner’s brain. Page turners are not ineffective because of Click Next but because developers regard it as doing nothing but scroll function.

What’s on each page and how it’s represented impacts memory more in a page turner than in any other elearning. Content chunking “do’s and don’ts” and media principles for use of text, images, and audio exert a considerable impact of memory encoding. Works of Fleming, Levie, and Mayer remain the foundation of design of instructional message. Without application of these, it doesn’t matter what level of courseware you create—the learner is saving the information to a soon-to-be-deleted temp file! Application of the media principles enables the user to save information to his ready-to-be-accessed “See” drive. 

Besides content design, a rapid elearning designer cannot afford to neglect the Component Display Theory. Component Display Theory maintains that to achieve higher levels of mastery, generalized content such as concepts, principles, and procedures need to be elucidated using a divergent range of examples and non-examples. This repository of examples and non-examples is the real interactive element of any learning. 

 Armed with a range of examples and non-examples, instructional designers can present the information using the inquisitory (Ask-then-reveal) method rather than the expository (Show-to-tell) method. Usually, it is the limited range of examples and non-examples that forces designers to rely of the standard rule-example sequence of presentation-activity-feedback routine. With more examples, presentation and feedback become integral to the learning activity.

To make your training more interactive, focus on the content development efforts for developing more examples and non-examples of the generalized content. What gets touted as Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 and Level 4 courseware is nothing but a description of the quality of examples embodied in a course. The more detailed and enriched an example, the closer it is to a reality-like simulation. Scenario-based practice and assessments utilize examples with the relevant details accentuated to make learning decisions possible.

To summarize, Click Next is not the culprit. To make rapid elearning more engaging, you need to work assiduously with the SMEs to develop more examples. Examples create opportunities for activities and activities yield better learner performance.

Blogs and also most e-learning leave behind their author footprints; sometimes harmonious, sometimes chaotic. The information is often perishable and could have been easily flushed out.

The 42 Design Square Blog “begins” by proclaiming its belief that beneath the laws (ahem!) of good design, which seem so obvious, lies skeptical observation, erudite questioning, and persistent inquiry. In this belief, the writers will examine old and new questions, which impact learning—its science, its art, and its craft.

No theoretical model can be built without assumptions; and the role of every good facilitator and student is to continuously relax those assumptions. Only then can one understand, and more importantly, apply.

The writings may not necessarily be the Company view or philosophy but will attest the Company’s commitment to incessantly question and provide food for thought to every instructional designer.

Welcome to the 42 Design Square blog.