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What can online course creators learn from other sectors?

December 20, 2024 by Ellen Finkelstein Leave a Comment

In my many years reading about and working on presentation training, I’ve seen a trend that not many people talk about — the separation into silos — or sectors — of course creation into educational training, corporate training, and personal training.

I’ve come to think that these sectors could learn from each other.

Just to clarify…

Personal training means courses that individuals pay for, whether for their personal benefit or to advance in their career or business. For example, entrepreneurs often take courses to learn how to grow their business.

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Corporate training means courses taught to employees of an organization, either created in-house or outside. The company pays for the course.

Educational training means courses taught by an educational institution, usually a college or university, including 2-year colleges. I’m not talking about K-12.

What’s the difference?

Customary practices are very different in the areas of:

Marketing
Testing / assessment
Structure

1. Marketing

Let’s start with marketing and look at all three sectors.

Personal training

Coaches, consultants, and others sell their courses and the students pay for them. (That’s sort of true in the educational field, since colleges students pay for courses, but they are not motivated by the price of individual courses, the marketing, or whether or not there will be testing as there is almost always testing.)

Therefore, in the personal training field, the teachers have to convince their students to buy their courses. There’s usually lots of competition, so they have to explain why the students should buy their course over a course from a competitor. They have to justify the price. They have to explain the benefits very clearly to motivate people to invest.

Marketplace courses target a wide audience, including hobbyists, freelancers, and professionals looking for specific skills. The instructors themselves promote their courses directly to consumers via email, SEO, digital ads, blogs, YouTube channels, and social media. Reviews and ratings from users (testimonials) play a huge role in marketplace success.

This type of marketing emphasizes affordability, flexibility, and variety. Platforms frequently run discount campaigns (e.g., holiday sales), offering courses at a fraction of the listed price to entice consumers. Overall, prices vary widely. A common technique is to have a range of price points. So an entrepreneur selling courses might have one at a low price point and then, when the students finish, offer another course at a higher price point. Maybe the higher-priced course goes into more depth or offers more personalized instruction/coaching.

Online courses often highlight niche topics or skills that may not be available in formal education or corporate settings.

Corporate training

In corporate training, companies use email campaigns, intranet/LMS notifications, and manager endorsements to promote courses to employees. There are times when the training is required, but that’s not the most common situation.

Now, let’s say you are in the corporate training field. What would you do differently if your students (employees) had to pay for your courses and there were alternatives on the same topics? You might:

Pay more attention to your marketing — how you describe the benefits of the course
Make the course more interesting by adding gamification (offering points and prizes), group projects, outings, role-playing exercises, etc.
Change how you test employees, perhaps using “inbox” exercises instead of written tests

Educational institutions

Now, let’s say you’re in the educational arena. Educational courses are marketed through academic institutions, leveraging their reputation and accreditation. Marketing is focused on formal qualifications (degrees, certificates), career paths, and professional development opportunities.

Marketing often highlights the availability of scholarships, grants, or financial aid to attract students who need assistance to enroll.

How to get marketing ideas from other sectors

If you are in the educational arena, how could you learn from the personal training field? Maybe you promote one course for a low price and then convince them to continue to get a degree. Or you could promote an upsell for a course that offers more personalized attention at a higher price, perhaps with a Teaching Assistant. You could collect testimonials from previous students talking about their experience with the content and/or the professor.

If you’re in corporate training, maybe you could use testimonials from previous learners to attract employees to a course.

If you’re in marketplace training, maybe you could provide a certificate to attract buyers.

Maybe you’re doing some of this. I’d love to hear what you think about these ideas and what other ideas you have.

2. Structure

The three areas also use a variety of structures for their courses.

Educational institutions structure their courses around a set curriculum and adhere to a fixed timeline, such as a semester or academic year. They include regular lessons, assignments, and exams. (In some cases, they might be required to do this, not only because of tradition but because of accreditation requirements.) Courses are usually synchronous and they use LMS (Learning Management Systems) platforms to host content, facilitate student discussions, and handle tests/course homework.

By contrast, corporate courses are more likely to be short. The content is broken into small, easy-to-consume segments, enabling employees to fit learning around their work schedule. These courses are often self-paced as well. The content is meant to be applicable immediately to a student’s job. Gamification is a common trend.

Marketplace courses use a variety of structures. Some are asynchronous and self-paced. Others are synchronous, using a “cohort” model. Some are short, others are longer, with corresponding price differences. Courses are more likely to be video-based, or maybe live and recorded (so students can attend live or watch the recording).

How to get structure ideas from other sectors

Here are some ideas for cross-pollination, so to speak…

Educational institutions could offer a wider variety of course structures, such as short, practical courses. They could offer self-study courses, as well. Some are doing this as part of Adult Education or Certification programs.
Marketplace courses could make more use of LMS platforms, including student discussion and gamification. Both are rare in marketplace courses.
Corporate courses could offer longer, more comprehensive programs that lead students to promotional opportunities.

Are you using some of these ideas? Do these ideas spark some possibilities in your field?

3. Assessment

Similarly, the 3 sectors take different approaches to assessment…

Educational institutions have a formal grading system involving tests, written assignments, and projects. Acceptable grades are necessary to get credit for a course and to get a diploma.

Corporate courses rarely grade learners but often track progress, especially when the course is required for the job. Companies may use a pass/fail system. There may be simulations or role-play exercises to prove competency. Requirements will be stricter when the course fulfills regulatory or legal requirements.

Marketplace courses don’t usually have formal assessments. Quizzes, exercises, homework, or projects might be offered, but they are often optional and designed for self-assessment rather than grading. However, certificates of completion may be offered.

How to get assessment ideas from other sectors

One idea would be for marketplace courses to test students and give a discount for further training based on the grade. They could also offer certifications more often.

Educational institutions do have non-graded courses in their Adult/Continuing Education programs and these could be used more often to get students into regular programs.

Corporate courses could add grades and give a bonus or even a raise based on those grades.

What other ideas do you have?

What’s next?

Think about the obstacles you face in your arena. How could you use techniques from the other arenas to solve your problems with marketing, structure, and assessment? How could you improve learner satisfaction?

Please leave a comment!

Using Microsoft’s Copilot (AI) in PowerPoint

February 10, 2024 by Ellen Finkelstein Leave a Comment

Almost a year ago, Microsoft announced Copilot to great fanfare. Copilot integrates ChatGPT and AI into Microsoft 365 (Office).

Many people are still waiting for it.

But I’m pleased to tell you that, as PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional, a Microsoft award), I have had access to it for a few weeks now and I can tell you about it. Even better, I’ll show you.

What can you do with Copilot in PowerPoint?

There are 3 main categories of tasks Copilot can do for you:

Creating a presentation from scratch or from a document
Editing a presentation, including re-organizing, replacing an image, and reformatting
Getting help from Copilot, including how to do a task in PowerPoint, summarizing a presentation, and finding content

In this blog post, I’ll also cover some best practices for getting the best results and explain what Copilot can’t do, at least not yet.

One point to make clear is that you always have full control over your presentation. It’s just a regular .pptx file and you can edit it manually however you want.

Getting started with Copilot

To get Copilot, you can go here.

There’s a free version, but it doesn’t work in PowerPoint or the other 365 apps. It also includes image creation in Designer, and if you’re signed in with a Microsoft 365 business or enterprise account you get some additional privacy/data protection features. It seems to me like it’s mostly like the free version of ChatGPT.

Then, there’s Copilot Pro. It gives you some bonus features in Edge, but if you’re a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriber it also gives you Copilot integrated into Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote. This is $20 per user per month.

Finally, there’s Copilot for Microsoft 365 which lets you use Copilot with PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, and Teams — as long as you have a Microsoft 365 account. And it includes other Microsoft apps and services that have (or will have) Copilot, and integration with the Microsoft Graph (your business data in Microsoft 365). That’s $30 per user per month.

At one time, you had to buy a certain minimum number of seats but that’s no longer true. Anyone can sign up.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is what I’m showing you here.

Opening the Copilot pane

Once you have Copilot, when you open PowerPoint, you’ll see the Copilot button at the right end of the Home tab. (By the way, it works differently in Word. There, you see the Copilot prompt on your page automatically.)

Click the button to open the pane, which you see above. There are some suggestions at the top but you’ll spend most of your time at the bottom, in the prompt area. You can type up to 2,000 characters in this box.

On the right side of the prompt box are 3 buttons:

View Prompts gives you some suggestions for prompts
Microphone lets you dictate prompts. Be careful with this, because if you aren’t precise and clear, you won’t get the results you want
Send is like pressing Enter and it submits your prompt

Creating a presentation from scratch

You can create a presentation from scratch by describing what you want in a prompt. In this video, you see me prompt Copilot to create a presentation about gamification. (I didn’t narrate it, so there’s no sound.)

What did you think of it? Considering that my final prompt was, “Create a presentation with 6-8 slides about what gamification for corporate online courses is and why a Training Department might want to use gamification in it in-house online courses,” I think it’s missing the first part completely, a definition of gamification.

Also, although it’s a good-looking presentation, I object to all the bullets. Unfortunately, Copilot can’t use SmartArt. More about that later.

Editing a presentation

You can open an existing presentation and use Copilot for it. In this case, I’ll use the one I just created and edit it.

As I indicated, I was unhappy that the presentation didn’t include a definition of gamification. My next prompt was this and it got me a new slide as you see here.

That was OK, but I needed some examples. So I went to the slide with the training listing benefits. You can see my prompt and Copilot’s answer here,

You do want to tell Copilot which slide to work on, but still, its response was terrible!

One lesson you need to learn with Copilot (and ChatGPT for that matter) is to have a conversation with it. If you don’t get the results you want rephrase your prompt.

So I tried in a different way. I was more specific and that worked!

Here you see the prompt and the resulting slide. Much better, right?

Copilot creates slides using the same resources that the Designer pane uses. It will periodically recommend that you use Designer, as you see above. When I clicked “Designer,” the Designer pane opened and gave me some variations. This isn’t really a Copilot feature at all, as you have that option even without Copilot.

You can see the options on the right. You can click any one of them to substitute that design for your current design.

You can continue to use prompts to:

Rewrite text
Reformat text
Add or delete slides
Reduce the amount of text on a slide (divide a slide into multiple slides)
Insert a picture
and more…

For example, if a slide title is in title case (initial caps) and you want sentence case, use the prompt, “Change the title of this slide to sentence case” and Copilot will do it for you.

However, if I ask, “Change all the slide titles in this presentation to sentence case,” Copilot responds, “You can find the “Change Case” feature on the Home tab of the ribbon, but I can’t access it directly. Would you like me to show you where it is?”

Well, I know where it is but that would require me to go into each slide separately. I left a frown about that one. (See later in the blog post for how to do that.)

One slide had a picture of dice and to me that represented gambling, which I didn’t think was relevant to gamification. Here’s what happened with I tried to fix it.

I wrote, “Please change the picture on this slide to a picture that doesn’t represent gambling”

Copilot said: OK, here you go. The picture on the slide has been replaced with a non-gambling image. For other options, try using the insert tab in the ribbon.

But it was another picture of dice!

I wrote, “No, dice represent gambling. Please change the image to something game-related but without dice.”

Copilot said: “OK, here you go. The image has been changed to a game board with pieces and cards, but no dice.”

This one was much better. So you see how you need to have a back-and-forth conversation?

Creating a presentation from a document

Copilot lets you work on your desktop version of PowerPoint (as well as the web version, which I don’t like to use), but the files have to be in OneDrive or Sharepoint, that is, online.

When creating a presentation from a Word document, here are the steps I use:

Open that document where it resides online
Click the Share button and copy the link.
In the CoPilot pane, click Create Presentation from File.
At the bottom of the pane, you’ll see a prompt for the link. Paste it there.

By the way, in Word, I could have used Copilot to ask for a description of brainstorming and its value. But I wrote this myself. Here’s the document I created. You can see that it’s very simple, with no formatting.

Copilot then gave me an outline in the pane and created this presentation.

There are problems with this. It certainly doesn’t need an agenda and the conclusion is too long for such a short topic, but it’s a start.

I noticed that one slide said that during brainstorming you “throw out ideas,” which I thought was misleading. (My fault, of course, since that’s what I wrote in the document.) I asked for alternative suggestions but it couldn’t help me. But when I told it to replace “throw out ideas” with “suggest ideas,” it made the substitution.

Getting help from Copilot

Here are some ways you can get Copilot to help you…

You can ask Copilot to summarize a presentation. Of course, this isn’t so valuable with something you created yourself since you already know what’s in it, but it’s a great help when you are working on another person’s presentation. Even for your own presentation, you can use the summary to tell colleagues about it, such as putting the summary in an email.
You can ask Copilot how to do something in PowerPoint. Usually the answers are accurate. For example, if I ask how to access SmartArt, it says, “You can find the “Convert to SmartArt Graphic” feature on the Home tab of the ribbon, but I can’t access it directly. Would you like me to show you where it is?” It offers a Show Me button that then points to the SmartArt icon on the Home tab.
You can ask Copilot to find content. I asked it to display the slide discussing pitfalls of gamification. It didn’t display the slide but told me it was on Slide 8, which was correct.
You can ask Copilot to delete a slide. Give it some information to identify which slide you want to delete. (You can always undo that action.)

You can also ask Copilot to add a slide. At the top of the pane, Add a Slide is one of the options. Copilot starts the prompt for you at the bottom of the pane and you can describe what you want the slide to cover. I asked it to add a slide with case studies of gamification and here’s what it gave me:

A course in Adobe Photoshop was gamified for online learning, and the average time on task increased by 50%.
A sales training program at Microsoft was gamified, and employee participation improved by 60%.
An electronic health records system was gamified at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and data entry accuracy increased by 42%.
A cybersecurity training course at NCR Corporation was gamified, and learning outcomes improved by 35%.

So, of course, I asked for the source of the data and you can see its response above on the right, “Sorry, I don’t know of a way to do that.”

Don’t ever trust stats given by any AI source.

On the other hand, when I searched Bing for the first bullet point above, I got some other stats with footnotes that were links to pages containing the stats. That was much more useful.

Getting the best results from Copilot

I do want to say that Microsoft is continually improving Copilot. It’s much better than it was just a month ago. If you see a problem, report it! On the Help tab, click Feedback and then Report a Problem. (You can also give a compliment or make a suggestion there.)

Microsoft DOES look at these reports.

Here are some pointers:

Make a copy of the slide if it has text on it that you don’t want to lose, and ask it to work on the copy
When you want it to work on specific text, put it in quotation marks, or you can specify the slide title, for example, if that’s what you want it to work on.
Give Copilot parameters, such as “create 6-8 slides” or “reduce the text on this slide to 3 bullet points.”
When asking Copilot to generate content, start with a broad brush and then ask it to get more specific.
Ask it to work on small segments of the content at a time. In PowerPoint, that often means one slide.
Use quotation marks when you want Copilot to work on specific text.
You can ask Copilot to write stories! When I asked it to write a story about how a team used brainstorming, here’s what I got:

+ A software development team was tasked with creating a new app for a client
+ They used brainstorming to generate ideas for the app’s features|
+ During the brainstorming session, team members suggested features that they had never considered before
+ The team evaluated the ideas and narrowed down the list to the most feasible and innovative ones
+The final product, which included many of the brainstormed features, was a huge success

Next Steps

If you don’t have Copilot at work, you can get it for $20 per month, which is worth a try. As I said, it’s improving constantly. Think how you might use it to create new presentations (think of them as instant drafts for you to work on) or improve existing ones.

I’m available for 1-on-1 consulting and training here.

What are your thoughts? Leave a comment!

Creating and using a strong call-to-action slide

May 5, 2022 by Ellen Finkelstein 3 Comments

At the end of a presentation, what do you want your audience to do?

You should know!

I often see presenters make similar mistakes at the end of their presentation:

They don’t have a call-to-action slide at the end
They have a call-to-action slide but follow it up with a “Questions?” slide, so that the call-to-action slide isn’t visible for every long
Their call-to-action slide has too much information on it so the audience gets confused. Should they write it down? Take a picture of it using their phone?

Sometimes, the presenters are embarrassed to ask for something.

Sometimes, they don’t realize they should be asking for something

Sometimes, they just don’t know how to use a call-to-action slide

Changing the world requires taking action

[Read more…]

Choosing a platform for your online course

May 15, 2021 by Ellen Finkelstein 4 Comments

When you’re ready to get your knowledge out to the world with an online course, you have many decisions to make! An important one is which platform you’ll use. The platform houses your course content. The platform is sometimes called a Learning Management System (LMS), but in truth, you may not even need an LMS.

In this article, I’ll discuss the various types of platforms you can use for your online course along with the advantages and disadvantages of each type. The cat tower in the photo on the right has lots of platforms; in this post, I’ll help you choose the right one for your online courses.

I also have an interview with an expert on online course platforms, Jeff Cobb, below.

Before you even start looking at options — and there are many — you need to make a few preliminary decisions:

How do you want to structure the course? Will you “drip” it out over time or give students access to everything at once?
What format(s) will you use? Recorded video? Text? Audio? Live webinars or meetings?
What interactivity do you want to include? Quizzes/tests? A discussion group/forum? Email coaching with you?
How much do you want to track students’ activity and progress? Do you want to send them reminders if they aren’t active?
How much support and training do you want from your platform?

Of course, if you work in an organization that has made this choice for you, you’re all set. This post is for people who have their own business or need to make the decision on their own.

Once you know the answers to these questions, you can start to narrow down your options. [Read more…]

Why you need a story for your presentations

March 3, 2021 by Ellen Finkelstein 1 Comment

How do you persuade people to implement your training, buy from you, or approve your proposal?

Yes, you need a good “offer,” whether that offer is to help trainees perform better, improve client’s results, or get more done with less money. But a good offer isn’t enough.

Lots of research has shown that emotion is necessary for people to make a decision. They buy in because it feels good. They believe that whatever you’re offering will help them in some way. It’s a common saying that people buy on emotion and justify it afterward. This applies even when the transaction isn’t a purchase for money. They buy the premise of your proposal. They accept that your training will get them where they want to be in the company.

And perhaps the best way to convey emotion is through a story, especially when backed up with strong images. For more information on how to choose the right images for your presentations, see my post, “4 secrets to choose the best images for your slides.”

So you need a story for your presentations. You can use many types of stories:

Case studies
Examples
Your story (an experience you had)
Stories about employees or customers
A story in the news
A story from history

A good way to start telling stories is to find something from your own experience that illustrates your point. It’s obviously going to be original, it’s personal (adds emotion), and you already have the content. You’ll often find that you can use this story over and over–just make sure it’s relevant to your presentation and the audience!

This is sometimes called a “signature” story and public speakers use it a lot. If you haven’t written your signature story, use the guidelines here to get it done!

Evoke emotions with a story

[Read more…]