Authoring In PowerPoint
Many customers author their training content in PowerPoint. And there many options for moving PowerPoint training into FlexTraining.
We suggest using your favorite PowerPoint conversion tool (we like Captivate, which is a versatile content-creation tool on the desktop, but others like Ispring or other tools) to turn the PowerPoint into Flash or HTML5. Flash was popular a couple years ago, but HTML5 is gaining popularity now.
Then you load the Flash (swf) file or the HTML files into you content library, where they can be included in FlexTraining learning screens by using the External_URL template. That’s all there is to moving PowerPoint presentations online as training content. You may convert and adjust the PowerPoint and the conversion settings a few times until you are happy with the converted output, before moving it into FlexTraining.
Another technique we have seen is to “print” the PowerPoint presentation to a PDF document. Then you would load the PDF document into the FlexTraining Content Library and utilize the External_URL template to create a Learning Screen. This works best for shorter presentations, so you should consider breaking longer presentations up before adopting this tactic.
Q & A:
Why can’t I just use a PowerPoint file right in my course?
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You can certainly do that. You can use your PPT or PPTX file and simply load it into your Content Library. But PowerPoint is a poor choice for deploying web-based education. First, PowerPoint does not “stream” like Flash and MP3 do; so it’s very slow to download to a student. Secondly, every student would need to have PowerPoint on their computer, and that’s not practical.
Why doesn’t FlexTraining automatically convert my PowerPoint file into Flash?
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Years ago we created just such a facility, an automated converter from PowerPoint to Flash, which was triggered upon uploading a PowerPoint file into FlexTraining. But customers did not use it. Why? Because they preferred the total control of sizing, effects, graphics, transitions and timing that they had with their desktop conversion tools (like Captivate and Ispring). So we retired the automatic conversion feature after a few years.
PowerPoint is an excellent authoring option, and moving PowerPoint content into FlexTraining is easy and offers many choices, like those above.
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