A simple and effective way to create a course module is using slides. But do this well though you’ll need to apply visual design thinking.
Let’s walk through an example.
How to Create Slides For Your Online Courses
You don’t want a slide to be hard to consume with an unclear message. For example, with too much text, fonts that are hard to read or data presented poorly.
Instead, it’s usually best to go with one concept per slide and use visual design for emphasis and focus. This could be replacing text with a graphic or presenting the data as a chart.
You’ll want your fonts to be easy to read and the colours to be inline with your message or branding. Also ensure you have a nice bit of negative space to give some breathing room to allow for focus.
As far as the images go, use your own if you can.
Most presentation applications do come with icons and graphics that you can use. Otherwise, there are lots of royalty free stock images available online from icons to photos.
Also make sure to go easy on those slide animations, they can be distracting so either just don’t use
them or just use the basic ones.
When putting the slides together as a package to meet the learning objective, then a good
approach is the sandwich technique where the content slides are sandwiched between an intro and outro slide.
- The intro can have a thought starter like a question or a problem.
- The middle slides have each step of the story or journey.
- And the outro you can summarize or conclude the answer or solution.
A slide pack can be stand alone if it is support material for a module but if it’s the main content
then it’s good to add some voice over and output it as a video.
To do this you’ll want to set up your slides to have a video aspect ratio of 16:9. Then there are a few ways to add your voice.
One option is record a voice over to each slide and then export the slides as a movie.
Another option is to do a screen recording as you play through the slides and record the voice at
the same time
Alternatively, you can add a separate voice over to your slide movie when video editing.
Summary
Slides can be good way to present your course content. Just make sure you are clear on the message and then reflect that in the design of each slide.
Action For You
Create the slides needed for your course.
Let Us Know In The Comments
Will you be using slides in your course?
Notes
Applications – Microsoft Powerpoint, Google slides, Apple keynote, Canva
Responses