Working With SME-Slides

Hi Kandice,

This is a situation a lot of instructional designers experience. We want to give our SMEs helpful parameters so they better understand how much content can fit into a time frame. And we want to prevent learners from getting information overload.

The number of slides is a metric most SMEs understand easily. Unfortunately, as Walt and Judy mentioned, there's not a strong connection between slide count and time. A light and thoughtful slide might take a minute to go through, or a dense one could take several minutes (and also lead to so much cognitive overload that learners don't take in the content). And learners don't tend to even notice slide counts if the content is engaging, well-paced, and useful to them.

The best approach is likely to vary from SME to SME, but one that might work (both for e-learning and presentation design) could be to pivot away from slides as your metric and instead get them to think about how many key takeaways/points they can cover in a time frame. It's still rather subjective and you'll probably need to give them examples of what a single takeaway is and isn't. But that approach would at least prevent SMEs from focusing so much on the slide count that they make the text tiny to fit more on each slide.

If you want to further borrow from presentation design, before your SME begins writing content you could work with them on an outline of the key points they plan to cover. Using the learning objectives as a jumping-off point, you could help them rough out the key point order and how much time should be devoted to each one. It's a bit more hand-holding on your part at first, but it likely could save time in the long run. It also promotes the idea that everything has to connect back to the learning objectives.

If slide count is still easier for them to consider, a middle ground could be to set up slide templates that promote the idea of one key point per slide. Give them directions about that focus, set the font size so it can handle only a minute or two's worth of text, and then have them agree to not change the size. It's not a perfect solution, but it might be another option to consider.

I'm sure there are other approaches that could work too, so I'm excited to see what other people share here about what they do in these situations.