PowerPoint has become widely used as a medium for building e-learning content. But those who oversee quality often run into these problems:
- Poor course-level instructional design (or none at all)
- Poorly designed individual slides
- Inconsistent visual and instructional design across different courses
- Time to build each slide takes a long time because there are so many possible ways to build it (which is what influences the inconsistency problem as well)
What I call rapid interactive e-learning development is one of the solutions to these problems. Form-based templates have these advantages:
- Better instructional design (assuming the templates have instructional design built into them)
- More consistent experience for the learner across courses making each course "intuitive" to the learner
- Fewer errors when building content because the template has been tested
- Ability to build interactive content quickly (not possible in PowerPoint)
- Overall faster development because course developers are not focusing on layout and visual placement (that's all built into the template ahead of time)
A large pharmaceutical customer of ours recently reported they were able to build courses 60% faster and with fewer errors using Rapid Intake Unison (online collaborative course authoring) than with Articulate (desktop-based PowerPoint conversion tool).
