“We have a two-day workshop and need you to turn it into a 30-minute online course,” your client says. “Here are 227 PowerPoint slides and 16 conflicting Word documents. Can you have it done by Thursday?”
What do you do?
Sign up for the eLearning Guild’s next online forum, “Converting Existing Course Content to e-Learning.” Ten sessions on Feb. 7 and 8 will offer useful ideas about tools and design.
On Friday morning, I’ll lead a hands-on workshop in which we’ll use a 4-step process that quickly chops through the jungle of existing content to find the online course within. We’re calling it “reverse instructional design.” Here’s a snippet of the session description:
We’re often asked to take PowerPoint slides, manuals, audio transcripts, and other content and somehow turn it into an engaging online course. If we do this without careful design, we end up with a boring content dump. Like reverse engineering, reverse instructional design figures out how the original content was designed and what it was meant to achieve. Then we clarify and significantly tighten that focus to create powerful, concise e-Learning.
As fodder for the workshop, we’ll use this OSHA PowerPoint slideshow about reducing violence in late-night stores.
Hi Cathy
Will your presentation be available afterwards, maybe as an article, for those who can’t attend the event?
Norman, thanks for your interest in the talk. I’ll probably convert my slides from the presentation into something that can stand alone and post them here at and Slideshare, plus do at least one blog post.
Hi Cathy,
Is this presentation anywhere for viewing?
Tracy, a recording of the presentation is available at the following link, but I’m not sure who has access to it:
http://www.elearningguild.com/content.cfm?selection=doc.898
Also, I’ve just added a blog post that describes the design process that I demonstrated in the talk:
http://blog.cathy-moore.com.php5-12.dfw1-1.websitetestlink.com/?p=215