Rapid Instructional Design with Powerpoint

I was recently part a discussion on the ThoughtWorks Trainer Community, where we were talking about the problems of having to put together a course with 2-3 days in hand. Usually the only recourse in such a situation is to quickly slam together something in Powerpoint. Firstly, I think the problem is genuine which is why I'm writing the post. This is what the usual approach which generally tends to be:

• Convert the subject matter into bullet points;
  
• Paste the bullet points into a Powerpoint deck;
  
• Think of a few exercises;
  
• Slam the exercises into the deck as well;
  
• Rehearse the presentation;
  
• Deliver

This process usually takes about 6-8 hours in total and I must confess that it saves a lot of time. The pitfalls I notice however are:

• The delivery usually involves reading from slides. An average adult (in this case the trainer), can speak only at 120 words per minute. An average adult (in this case the student), can however read at 250 words per minute. So, your audience is perhaps reading much faster than you are. In effect if you're trying to tell a story, your audience knows the moral before you reach the climax!
  
• When you read from slides your attention is more on the visuals (if that's what you'd like to call a pack of bullet points) as against being in the moment and interacting with your audience. From the audience's point of view, people can rarely read and listen at the same time, so either you or your slides are being redundant.
  
• A question to ask yourself is -- if your audience can read this material then do you really need to be there? Maybe you could send an email and as a follow up have a quick interactive QnA which could be more valuable. Remember that a document is a richer mode of communication than a Slideument (higher resolution, et all).
  
  • OTOH, if you think your presence is invaluable then you need to put in more thought into the S-T-O-R-Y you want to tell. This will in all likelihood take more time but be more effective.
    
  • After all, if you want to save time think of the value -- if you do a crappy 2 hour training session for a group of 18 people, you've perhaps wasted 18 x 2= 36 hours + 2 hours of your own time.

This said, I understand the problem of time, so here's an approach I like to follow which is instructionally sound, and takes less than the 40 hours of design for 1 hour of content ratio.

Get some Alone Time

Getting some alone time helps you think through your story for the session. It usually helps me think through the purpose of the session and really what amongst the huge list of topics is key to delivering your message. I tend to think of what's most important and then discard the rest at this point. Isolating the core message and excluding the fluff usually helps me get through the rest of the steps really quickly.

Plan Analog

The usual tendency especially if you're a computer freak, is to run to your computer and start slamming together a "deck". Garrey Reynolds, talks about the importance of good old messy analog planning (as against planning digitally on the computer) to decide how your story flows. From the perspective of Instructional Design think of how you will Introduce (eg: Individual & Group Brainstorm) the topic, Explore the topic (eg: Facilitated Discussion) and Culminate the session (eg: Hands on exercise practicing the concepts taught, followed by a debrief). There are plenty of ways to do your planning:

• Use Index Cards or Stickies to create a story board.
  
• Sketch out your ideas on plain paper.
  
• When working in pairs, mindmap your thoughts on a whiteboard
  
• Print out blank Powerpoint slides and sketch out your ideas in the slides, while using the notes section to record what you want to say.

The key to making this work is in ensuring that you think in terms of visuals and not content. What picture best associates with the point you're trying to make? Roughly sketch out the picture and as of now, don't bother how you'll digitize it. I like Dan Roam's Visual Thinking Codex to sketch out the ideas. When you HAVE to add text, try using the Takahashi/ Lessig style. Limit the number of words on your visuals to a maximum of three or four. The huge advantage of connecting with your story in this physical manner, is that you have a strong connection with your story and lets say, your computer ever goes down, you still understand what you're trying to convey to your students.

Digitize your story

You should be able to do this pretty quickly, given that you've already got the flow of your session in your mind. A few things I'll ask you to keep in mind:

• Keep in mind the CRAP Guidelines;
  
• When positioning/ selecting/ composing visuals, remember the Rule of Thirds;
  
• Avoid Clipart; use Stock Images. You could shoot your own photos or use any of these sources for "free", high quality images:
  
  • Flickr Creative Commons
    
  • Everystockphoto
    
  • Stock Xchng

You may also want to use comics and I really like the Design Comics toolkit to achieve this.
I recently wrote a post which will hopefully give you an idea of how to isolate your speech from the visuals. It is however extremely important to record your speaking notes, because then you can pass on the deck with limited handover to another person. You will also need to create handouts and activity sheets, so budget time for that. This is where the "copy-paste" could work!

Rehearsals

Once you've got your visuals in place, its perhaps a good idea to do a dry run. It'll never work perfectly the first time -- you've got to trust me on this. Doing a dry run with some colleagues or your co-speaker or just in front of an empty set of chairs is perhaps a good idea. It helps you connect with the visuals better and just helps you generate feedback on the simplicity of the learning. I'd say if it took you two days to complete the above steps, you should reserve the last day for this.

If you've followed the above steps then you've perhaps got a reasonably well documented approach, which people can iteratively build upon. It'll perhaps take you about 16-20 hours to do this, but hopefully, you'll deliver a more effective session.

Just to learn more about how you can design and deliver the longest lasting experiences, read A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink and Made to Stick by the Heath Brothers.