Fixing Online Learning One eCourse at a Time

Presentations are broken. If you do a web search for the words "Death by PowerPoint", over 3 million results are returned. It’s clear that the presentations must change. But busy schedules don’t leave much time for changing how you present.

Online training lets you learn at your own pace, but just like presentations are broken, so too are many eLearning courses.

Many trainers re-purpose the boring, bullet-point heavy slides they use at the front of the classroom and dump them straight onto a computer screen. They’ve moved from in-person read-alongs, to virtual read-alongs. The only difference is that the voice droning on over those dense slides is pre-recorded. This approach doesn’t work in person, but it especially doesn't work online where the audience has many more distractions.

Just like effective presentations, to get people to pay attention and retain information, you must keep them engaged.

Many of the issues with eLearning effectiveness are the same problems that plague presentations. So, in our own journey to create online presentation training that could keep even the busiest people engaged, we took on the challenge to create unique, engaging online content — following the same rules for creating a great presentation.

And pretty quickly, we got exciting news. Just after the soft-launch of our new eCourse was complete, it won an award!

We used my book, the HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations as a base for the eCourse. The content was was already broken into chapters, but we knew the it needed to be visualized and further divided into learning-sized portions — while also providing a dynamic, interactive example of a great presentation.

We learned a lot along the way, but there are three crucial rules to follow when creating online learning, and great presentations.

Pay Attention to Design

The most engaging eCourses place high value on good design, because this drives how your learners process the information. Many traditional online training programs include a clunky UI that clutters up the screen. We designed a hidden navigation that appears if you tap the top of your tablet, or click at the top of your desktop screen. This allows learners to view the content without interruption, while maintaining full navigability throughout the course. We also designed a map of the entire course so that learners can understand where they are in the content, and can easily review material at a later date.

Encourage Practical Application:

Many online training programs struggle to provide immediately applicable skills. To remedy this, my team created 54 downloadable PDFs that learners use to create their own presentation as they go through the course. Khan Academy accomplishes this for traditional academic material by asking questions at the end of each lesson, and providing resources to review if the student needs to go deeper into the subject matter.

Modularize the Content:

People have a limited attention span. With business moving faster than ever, it’s difficult—if not impossible—to make time for long, uninterrupted training. Self-guided eCourses should be broken up into bite-size chunks of content so learners work through each module at a reasonable pace. Modularized content allows learners to fit the courses into their work schedules with natural stopping points built in. Our eCourse has nearly 8 hours of content, but it’s broken into 67 modules! Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin, also offers modularized content in his online training.

As technology enables educators to move training online, we must incorporate best-practices for visual storytelling into eCourses. We’ve built an eCourse that will teach you how to create powerful messages and visuals that engage your audience, but it’s in a a dynamic learning environment that will keep you engaged, too. After all, our audience is you.

Check out the Persuasive Presentations eCourse, as the first step toward creating better presentations, and shifting the paradigm. And please share your feedback and experience!

Photo credit: Duarte, Inc. 2014

Nancy Duarte is CEO of Duarte, Inc. and the author of Resonate, Slide:ology, and the HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations. She has a passion for teaching others about the power of persuasive presentations to drive change in the world.

Nancy recently released a free multimedia version of her best-selling book Resonate. Enjoy a significantly enriched, interactive experience on any device and browser!

Explore the browser-based book for free: Resonate

Download the book from Apple's iBooks for free: iTunes

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