10 Things To Know About Powerpoint Animation For Rapid Elearning

Despite the popularity of Flash and other animation software, PowerPoint still remains a favorite tool in making presentations and e-courses in today's training and elearning development. However, before you begin developing a presentation, it may be a good idea to familiarize yourself in creating PowerPoint animations for rapid elearning.

1. Prepare Ahead

Begin by preparing ahead of time. Know your objectives and have an outline of what you want to produce before you think of animation.

2. Be Mindful of Your Color Scheme

Although the color scheme may not really be related to PowerPoint animation, this is something that many e-learning course designers overlook. No matter how great your animation, if your color scheme is not effective, your audience will get bored and disinterested.

3. Take it Easy with the Slides

People who are just learning about PowerPoint animation tools often get carried away when designing Although moving graphics and swirling letters might be interesting, it might get your learners overwhelmed if you need to make several slides to convey just a single thought.

4. Avoid Fancy Transitions

There is nothing wrong with creative transitions when designing a rapid e-learning course, but make sure that the one you choose is simple and not too distracting.

5. Avoid Linear Navigation

Allow learners the freedom to navigate freely through the course. Restricting them to a linear navigation may end up forcing them to view topics they may want to skip otherwise.

6. Too Much Graphics can be Distracting

Though graphics make training livelier and engaging, overusing them may end up distracting the learner form the course content.

7. Use Clicking and Moving Clip Arts Lightly

Animation may be about making things move and active, but having too many moving objects and clicking sounds do not help your training course at all.

8. Don't Be Afraid to Use Video

One exciting PowerPoint animation tool that you can use is video. You can embed flash movies or videos in your presentations. Using video helps mainly for technical products and to show how they work, goes a lot further than just providing product specifics to achieving a particular goal. Videos can be used as examples for training sales reps to show how a particular sales situation was handled by a sales person as this captures body language, tone and expressions as well, something that can't be done using another medium.

9. Go Ahead Record an Audio

In order to make PowerPoint animation more exciting, livelier and interesting, you can always record audio narration on your training module. I think audio works best where it is used in moderation to add emotional appeal or to get across the views of an expert. There is no need for audio while taking assessments.

10. Bells, Whistles, and the entire Hullabaloo

Go easy on the flying in, zing, and other seemingly magical animation effects. This can only distract users of your training course.