Turn your PowerPoint into effective e-learning

But how do we enable employees to share knowledge with less time, less resources, and less guidance? Turn your information-overloaded PowerPoint presentations into effective e-learning.

Curate and build on existing presentation decks

According to research estimates, there are more than 120 million presentations created in education and business environments. That’s a lot of unprocessed knowledge!

The first step of your knowledge sharing strategy should be to leverage this existing content. The surplus PowerPoint decks in every computer can be potential sites to search for e-learning content.

You can save a lot of time by curating what’s out there already instead of creating content from scratch. Think about recycling as a metaphor, this is the eco-friendly learning technique.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) should think of some of the prominent learning needs in their respective teams and map the presentations with these needs. The PowerPoint content should then be curated in order to answer these learning needs.

Curation in this sense does not mean transferring all the content on a subject from the presentation into an e-learning course. Instead, the information should be carefully selected and context should be provided as to why, based on their subject expertise, it is relevant and helpful.

Knowledge sharing is easy with the right tools

Once all this PowerPoint content has been gathered, it needs to be crafted into a course. It is important to note here that PowerPoint is not e-learning. PowerPoint is a passive format and is not conducive to engagement with learning content. You need to transform your curated PowerPoint content into fun and interactive modules. Read our blog post for tips on moving past the PowerPoint mindset.

More often than not SMEs aren’t familiar with e-learning or instructional design. This isn’t a concern. By choosing a zero-learning curve authoring tool (like Easygenerator) and course templates, SMEs can focus on effective learning content rather than fussing over pixel-perfect design.

Course authoring tools often support SMEs in creating didactically-sound courses. For example, Easygenerator’s Learning Objective Maker helps course authors create learning objectives based on Bloom’s taxonomy.

L&D’s role is in continually guiding SMEs on e-learning best practices, and the best ways to engage their learners with the subject. Under an Employee-generated Learning approach, L&D (and/or Instructional Designers) move from creators to quality control.

Knowledge sharing is a continual process

Knowledge sharing isn’t a one-and-done kind of task. It is a continual process of creating, curating, and updating. In fact, because Employee-generated Learning is an ongoing process, it is more up-to-date and more relevant than learning content created in the traditional fashion by instructional designers.

So L&D needs to positively encourage subject matter experts in their new role. With the right guidance, PowerPoint presentations will be replaced by effective e-learning courses.

You can read our research paper on how high-performing organizations are accelerating their learning and development with Employee-generated Learning.