Course Design with Large Text Content

Hi Ather, and welcome to Heroes.

You will get many answers to this, I am sure.

One way to get around this issue is to use reduced words on the .ppt, and use a voiceover to expand a little on this. Have an Attachment, ot Attachments (using the Attachment feature) to refer them to, which has all the words.

Have a dig around here, under "Building Better Courses" and I am sure you will find loads of ideas, and I am sure you willl get  many more ideas here once Easter break is over and the site gets fullly active again.

Once again -  welcome.

Bruuce

I would suggest you check out SoftChalk to possibly house your wordy content.  I use both SoftChalk and Articulate together for my courses with great success and then upload to my LMS (Blackboard).  I do like Bruce's suggestion of making reduced words ppt files along with attachments of your word documents in Articulate Presenter.  The ppts with voice over explaining the content would be more engaging than just having the participants read a whole lot of text in my opinion. 

Some more thoughts...

Firstly - your question is not elementary, it's one of the most searching questions, (and complicated to answer), that you could have asked. If you are "new to Articulate", I am going to make the asumption that you are also new to eLearning, (I hope that's correct).

When you create a piece of eLearning, one of the things I try and figure out is what is "learning", and what is "supporting data".

At the moment, all your content is probably linear - you start <here>,,,you wander down the winding road of "learning" <tum tee tum tee tum>, and you stop here <tada!>.

Then you do it all again....and repeat.

When moving it to an electronic format, it may be that your data can be split and aggregated......

What do you mean Bruce?

You take all the "simple and introductory" subjects, and make them one course or module, than take all the "middling" level data, and out that into one course.

You can then split things again, so that each course has - perhaps - a split between "Introducing Topic x", and "Other theories about Topic X" which are held in the Attachments. Does this make sense?

Presenting "engaging information" sometimes means getting rid of some of the information, or at least, making consumption of it optional at any one point.

This can be hard at first, because the data "owner(s)" will have a lot of time etc. invested in the production of data, and do not like to see it "pushed to the back", or "made optional".

This is where lots and lots of change in approach comes, and can create some tensions, especially where there is multiple ownership of data.

It is seldom in my experience ever the case that a learner needs everything NOW, it, on the "slide". Is your goal to get them to remember in "one sitting", or do you wnat them to come back again and again, (will your access/LMS be simple to allow this, if it's complicated, they will not bother....)

Learning with paper and online comes in layers - you learn, you come back again, like with a book, and you MUST also be able to easily browse/surf around the information, NOT just be able to browse "end-to-end".

You say two things that need more thought in my opinion:

...so we can't replace text with instructor's delivery. "

Yes you can - voiceover. It may or not be correct to do so, and I know many people think v/o detracts, however, it can be done.

"We also have developed scenarios/stories developed to explain every concept, and that is primarily textual." - again, you may need "text" to explain it, but with v/o you could use spoken text to explain images, images in scenarios are, (again in my opinion), much more powerful.

It sounds here as though your background here is "technical" or "educational establishment", I have not tried to check. You seem to be caught up in a world of "printed words". You may need to make some serious adaptations to this production in order to create something that is engaging and viable.

Again, I'd recommend having a real dig into the articles on these forums, this topic comes up again and again, and there are plenty of ways to do this. You need to have faith in the LEARNING MESSAGES that you are trying to get over to people, not necessarily the WAY THAT IT IS PRESENTED to people. Reframing your thinking like this wil make the transition to eLearning (of any sort, using any product), so much simpler.

Yes - the Articulate Suite works from a PowerPoint source, but here is the greatest "secret" of all eLearning and presenting....PowerPoint does not have to look like PowerPoint. It does not need to have bullets, set fonts, and a logo on every page. At it's best - it's a completely blank sheet of paper. You can do anything with it.

Have a look in the Community Blogs > eLearning examples section.

Does any one of those examples look like PowerPoint?

Here are the links, but for some reason I cannot get them to work at the moment....

http://community.articulate.com/blogs/elearning-examples/default.aspx
http://www.articulate.com/blog/category/guru-awards/

Hope this makes sense, and helps with your thinking processes.

Bruce