How Much PowerPoint?
Today, PowerPoint appears to be omnipresent in every instructor-led training programme. But, is it too omnipresent? Omnipresent to the extent that it actually hinders learning?
Perhaps.
But how does one measure the omnipresence of PowerPoint? Based on the number of PowerPoint slides used?
Yes, that is one parameter we could look at. So the question is: what’s the maximum number of slides one should use for an hour of effective training?
There seems to be no clear answer to the question. I believe no significant research has happened in this area.
However, we do have a few pointers that give us some hints. Though the available pointers or guidelines relate to presentations rather than training, I believe we could extrapolate the guidelines to training too.
Guy Kawasaki, the venture capitalist, is often quoted on his 10/20/30 rule for presentations: a PowerPoint presentation should have 10 slides, last no more than 20 minutes, and contain no font smaller than 30 points.
Of course, Guy is mostly referring to presentations about raising capital, making a sale, and so on. And, he’s talking about short and crisp presentations.
Training presentations could be considerably longer than just a few minutes. But, as the presentation time increases, the relative number of slides should decrease. So, I don't think Guy would recommend having 30 slides in a presentation of one hour. Those are far too many slides.
Jeff Taylor, the founder of monster.com, is reported to use 11 slides for an hour of presentation. John Chen, the CEO of Sybase, is said to use 15 slides in an hour. Tony Robbins, the motivational guru, apparently uses just 5 slides in two hours!
FKA (Learning and Performance consultants), in one of their newsletters, says that their research suggests using a maximum of 12 slides for an hour of effective training.
Guila Muir, a train-the-trainer specialist, has a far more extreme rule of thumb:
- For a 30-minute presentation, use 1-2 slides
- For an hour’s presentation, use a maximum of 4 slides
- For an all-day training session, use a maximum of 8 slides
When I posed the question to Saul Carliner (prolific researcher, author, and e-learning expert), he offered the following advice:
- For a presentation of less than 10 minutes, use 1 slide per minute
- For a presentation of 11-30 minutes, use 1 slide per 2 minutes
- For a presentation of 31-90 minutes, use 1 slide per 3 minutes (or 20 slides per hour)
- For a presentation longer than 90 minutes, use 1 slide per 5 minutes (or 12 slides per hour)
Assuming that most training sessions last for more than an hour, the guideline that emerges suggests having about 5-12 slides per hour of training.
Would you agree?
1 comment:
Hi Fred
This rule might work in presentations but consider the following facts.
1. The rule in ID says that content should be broken down into digestable chunks.
2. Trainers should be able to use the slides as a cue to teach concepts.
3. The students should be able to map the trainers dialouge to the graphic and text on the slide.
For motivational speeches and revenue generation the slides are used a medium of conveying thoughts and initiating a discussion. Thus they should not be considered for training surveys.
The train-the-trainer guru techniques will have to be studied coz 4 slides in one hour means that you are spending 15 minutes on a silde and that means that you are actually only discussing strategies and labs in the lesson instead of content. Even that figure is useless for training purposes.
What strikes me the the best is the Saul Karliner figure for e-learning.
I think if we follow the principles of design and content chunking properly we would reach some where between 20-25 slides in an hour. If we include time for activities and review we could reduce it to 15 slides.
Regards
Akshay
Post a Comment