It has been awhile since I last blogged. I’ve been reading various blogs, but haven’t felt the inspiration until today.
I am about to embark on a new project. I want to figure out how to integrate the good parts of ISD (identifying objectives and outlining the flow before developing) with the concept of storytelling and the Beyond Bullet Points approach to writing slideware.
My requirements are pretty standard. The products I write training for are rapidly changing (isn’t everything in high tech?). The folks teaching the training are not trainers, rather they are technical folks (programmers and troubleshooters). So, the goal is to create PPT presentations that can be presented well by anyone, and to do it in a manner that doesn’t take a tonne of time to maintain, since the products constantly change.
I tried incorporating full sentence titles in my slides (rather than topic headings). Apparently research shows that students remember more of the presentation when this technique is used. I found a useful side effect to this approach: it makes the slides easier to present. Specifically, it makes it easier for someone who didn’t author the slides to present them. I found that the instructors knew what the intention of every slides was — because it was written in the title! I’m a convert. I will no longer use topic titles for slides …. that being said ….
The use of full sentences doesn’t align well with a “topic” based approach to course design. The process I have been using definitely promotes the use of topic titles rather than full sentence statements. So, this is my next journey. I’m going to try and figure out a process for developing training that involves excellent PPT presentations (full sentence titles and lots of graphics), and takes into account learning objectives. I’ll share this on my blog as I discover things that work.
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