Slide-based courses are great for sharing knowledge across the company. You must keep employees interested in these training materials. Training won’t work if learners don’t retain the new information. These 6 simple tips will help you avoid PowerPoint death and give employees meaningful learning experiences.

How to create an engaging training presentation

Interactivities make a course more interesting. This is partly true, however, as training content must be planned at all levels. You’ll then learn how to engage learners from the planning stage to the implementation of your course.

Tip 1: Create an interactive course plan with a storyboard

It’s a good idea to begin to prepare and lay out your interactive presentation. A storyboard will help you visualize how your presentation will look. The storyboard is a visual representation of the course you are creating. It allows you to plan interactivity and present material in a way that engages learners.

You can use a Word document to create your virtual storyboard or a mockup presentation where you can arrange text, images, charts, tables, and lists in a different order. This will allow you to choose the most effective way to communicate information and help learners connect better.

If you use iSpring SuiteMax, this is how your storyboard will look. Storyboarding can be a time-saver and will speed up the process of building a course with stakeholders and collaborating with others.

Tip 2: Use a great script to hook learners

Although we can all be bored by long slides, some topics need to be explained in detail. Your course’s script is what guides and tells the story to your learners. It also immerses them in the topic.

A presentation script usually includes both on-screen text and narration. You need to be able to deal with both. Although you can work with subject matter experts to prepare the script, texts must be understandable by learners with predetermined levels of training.

A narration script must sound great and on-screen text should look professional. Your script must be easy to read and understand for both the reader and listener to engage. We recommend you:

• Use short sentences and a natural tone.

• To make scrolling easier and improve readability, divide your text into shorter passages.

• Before you start reading the script, make sure to read it aloud. Make sure that the sentences sound natural and are easy to understand.

Your presentation will be more engaging and effective if you write and present slides in human terms, not robotically. Some authoring tools like iSpring Suite Max have a text-to-speech function. This feature allows you to record a completely authentic narration in any language. 

iSpring Suite max allows you to transform the text into a computer-generated voice-over in just a few clicks. A built-in audio editor in iSpring can be used to enhance your recording and add effects.

Tip 3: Create interactive assessments

Engaging knowledge checks such as mini-games and quizzes will make your presentation more engaging. These will allow you to assess how learners learn the information you have just covered. It will also help you increase their engagement and make employee training less one-way.

You can ignite your learners’ thinking by using true/false and matching activities.

You can create a slide-based course using iSpring Suite and use 14 types of interactive assessments. Also, quizzes are built from premade templates. You can set the number of attempts, make them graded or ungraded and give feedback on right and wrong answers.

Tip 4: Spice it up with videos

A presence effect is another way to engage learners. Picture-in-picture videos that feature a presenter in the corner of a screen can be used to accompany screencasts and offer additional guidance for learners.

You can record virtually any instructional video with your laptop’s webcam, including tutorials, presenter-style, and talk head videos. 

Tip 5: Use simulated experiences to enhance your presentation

Interactive dialogue simulations can be created in PowerPoint to help your employees improve their customer service and sales skills. These simulations simulate customer interactions and other workplace situations.

Even if you don’t have any programming skills, the trial version of iSpring Suite Max is required to create a PowerPoint dialogue simulation. This tool also comes with a content library that includes professional backgrounds and characters, so you don’t have to search for additional visual assets for your interactive dialog simulation. 

These are just a few characters you could include in your dialogue sim.

Select the appropriate emotion and then insert the characters’ phrases into the reply options. These dialogue simulations are invaluable for customer service training, soft skills development, and salesperson training. These simulations will teach your employees how to better understand other people’s emotions and then act accordingly.

Tip 6: Get feedback from your employees about your presentation

Do you want your employees to feel motivated to train? Listen to their opinions. The course’s learner impressions will help you to identify the strengths and areas for improvement. You can ask for feedback from your employees and encourage them to submit their opinions via an online survey. This can be done in Google Forms, or iSpring Suite Max. All of these options are available in the same PowerPoint interface.

As an instructor, it is important to give timely feedback on student assignments, questions, comments, and comments. Your learners need to see you care about the content of the training. This will help keep the group motivated and encourage engagement in online training.

A consistent approach and careful consideration are essential to make your presentation interesting for learners. This article will provide you with useful tips for setting up your slide-based course for success right from the beginning. Good luck!