Best Practice for PPT to eLearning Course

Hi Laura and welcome to the community.

From a technical perspective, importing a PowerPoint file into Storyline 360 is both fast and easy. The steps take just a few clicks and are outlined in this article. So if you want to kickstart production by reusing some or all of your PowerPoint slides as the starting point for your e-learning slides, you don't need any additional products or add-ons to make that happen.

That said, from a training design perspective, it's also important to think about what's different about learning from a PowerPoint deck versus an e-learning course. PowerPoint decks can be fantastic for accompanying a live presenter. But they don't have much interactivity and don't give learners much choice in how they go through content. Those are things that e-learning can do exceptionally well.

So to get the most value from the e-learning format, you may want to do more than simply import your PowerPoint slides. You'll also want to consider what you can change, remove, and add to your slides to take advantage of the different functionality e-learning offers and help your course content click for people.

When you have lots of design and development time, sometimes this means completely reworking the course content. This article has some tips on doing that. But you mentioned you're in a time crunch, so here are some tips on smaller-scale renovations that can help a lot in the process:

• People like having choices. So if your course sections don't have to be completed in a specific order to make sense, consider building a main e-learning menu where people can choose what order they go through each section.
• Is there information in your course that would benefit from interactivity—either to encourage people to think about the information in new ways or just to break up text-heavy slides and make them easier to take in? Consider changing those sections of the course into interactive activities. To do that quickly, try using the freeform questions feature and free interaction templates included in Storyline 360.
• This is also a good time to assess the course content to see if there are opportunities to streamline the course information. Look for opportunities to trim out unnecessary content and trim down the text you choose to keep.
• If your slides are very text-heavy, you might have an easier time moving your course into Rise 360 instead of Storyline 360. You can't auto-import the content, so you do have to copy and paste your text. But Rise 360 is well-suited to courses that use a lot of text and multimedia. Also, Rise 360 development tends to be faster than Storyline 360 since it handles much of the visual and interaction design work for you. So that's an alternative option to consider.

Best of luck with this project and keep us posted if any other questions come up along the way!