E-learning templates are great. They speed up production and deliver a professional and polished look. And there are lots of e-learning templates from which to choose. Articulate 360 offers slides and interaction templates for both Storyline 360 and Studio 360 in PowerPoint.

With all that said, there are some challenges with templates and issues I run into when delivering the e-learning workshops.

• Mix & match templates. The course author wants to mix and match templates. Generally, this is easy enough to do. For the most part it’s a matter of changing theme colors and theme fonts. But this assumes that the person who created the template used the accent colors the same way. Also, if the colors aren’t mapped to the color themes, then they can’t be changed through the themes and need to be changed at the slide level.

• Inconsistent slide layouts. In the same sense, it can be a bit tricky when trying to apply the layouts from one template to another if they aren’t mapped to the same type of content and layouts.

• Different design elements. Templates often have visual design elements (and layouts) that make the template design unique. Thus trying to modify one to another style may create some additional work to get a similar look and that often defeats the time savings and efficient production that the template should produce.

A template is designed to provide something specific and not require a lot of customization. They’re great when it’s mostly a matter of adding new content without a lot of editing.

Customization (such as what’s noted above) breaks the concept of the template. As soon as the author needs to customize the template, it often involves deconstructing and reconstructing the layouts and some functionality. This usually requires as much time (sometimes more) as building the screens from scratch. And at that point, the value of the template is lost.

Thus, the big question: how to get the most value out of the template?

It starts with understanding your content and how it needs to be displayed. Once you know that, you can determine how to add your content to the course and how you want it displayed.

Screens are going to be made of text and media (buttons, pictures, shapes, and video). They can be laid out any number of ways: up, down, left, and right.

• Select a single template style. You can always change the colors and fonts to match your brand and course requirements. But you want a single template.
• Download all of the slides for that template. I usually add them to a side scene and then copy and paste what I want to use. I delete the unused scene right before I publish the course.
• Modify the theme fonts and colors if needed. Then apply those to your template.
• If you need a new slide (and want to build it from scratch), use the layouts that are part of the template and not outside of it. This keeps it using the same theme colors and fonts.

If you understand your content and stick with a single template, you’ll find working with the templates to be easy. If you try to mix and match templates, you may find it’s more work than creating content from scratch.

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Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

There are a lot of free graphics files available online. Many of the free graphics are illustrations that are .EPS or .SVG files. The challenge is editing those files to suit your own needs.

If you already own a graphics program, then you can edit the files with no problems. If you don’t, then you have to look for other options.

Photopea is a free app where you can edit graphics files online. It’s fairly easy-to-use and includes a standard graphic’s editing user interface. I’ve included two quick tutorials to feature a few of thing things I like about the free application.

How to Edit EPS & SVG for Free

Click here to view the tutorial on YouTube.

Here’s how to upload and edit a .EPS file. Working with the .SVG files is generally the same.

How to Convert Bitmap Illustrations to Vector for Free

Click here to view the tutorial on YouTube.

Here’s how to convert a bitmap illustration to a vector for easier editing.

This is a great application for doing some simple edits of your graphics. The price is especially great if you don’t have your own graphics editor. If you want to learn more, you can check out their learning resources here.

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Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Here’s an issue I run into quite a bit: I need a map for my e-learning courses; but I don’t need a detailed map.

Stock image sites are fine for generic illustrated maps but they’re usually too generic. The other option is to do a screen grab of an online map, but then that’s often too detailed.

Recently, I was working on a map demo where I needed a specific map, but I didn’t want a real map screen shot because it was too busy and I knew the stock sites couldn’t provide what I needed because it was too specific. Fortunately, I found this site, Snazzy Maps, that makes it easy to customize Google’s online maps.

Examples of Custom Maps for E-Learning

Here’s why this comes in handy.

Most maps have too much visual information. For example, if I built a labeled graphic map of some historic sites in Washington, D.C. I need a simple map for reference, but I don’t need all of the street names and colors that may distract from my labels. Instead I want a map that gives me some context, but allows the label to be the star of the show.

In the example above, the real online map has way too much visual info. It’s hard to know where to look first. In fact, it’s difficult to see the markers because of all of the colors, text, and roads. I’m not using this map to drive an Uber so I probably don’t need all of the detail and distracting visual information.

This next example above is the complete opposite. All of the colors are turned off as well as many of the roads. A gray scale map like this allows the accent colors from the labels to really pop. In fact, one of the best simple tips for course design is to get rid of competing visual information like colors and then only use color to accent or highlight content. In this example, the marker colors are much more distinct.

For this particular interaction, I like having a little color to show the park and monuments in relationship to the city and water. I turned off the titles and some of the roads. You can still recognize it as a map, yet it’s not quite as busy.

Customizing the Maps

To be honest, I don’t have the patience to learn how to use the Snazzy Map site. So I started with one of the maps someone with more patience created. And from there it was just a lot of clicking around to see what I can edit. Most of it makes sense and with a little practice you can get almost any look you need.

If you need a custom map for your e-learning courses, check out the site. It may come in handy.

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We all like to see good e-learning examples. That’s one reason I really enjoy the e-learning challenges. They’re little nuggets of creativity. They’re usually not full-fledged courses, but they often have some interesting elements.

In a recent challenge on course starter templates for leadership training, community member, Andrzej Jabłoński, shared a really nice example. Check it out below.

Click here to view the demo.

Here’s what stood out:

• The visual design is fun and clean. I think often our e-learning courses look too formal or corporatey (if that’s a word). We think because it’s a serious topic that the visuals need to look serious. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I like this design because it doesn’t look like a typical corporate course. Yet it’s professional and engaging.

• The subtle animations work well. They get your attention, but they’re not gratuitous. Break down the course and look at how he used the animations.
• Leverages existing illustrations. He used an image from freepik to create the visual elements for his demo. As he says, “I mainly work on redesigning and adjusting images for my projects. It’s also a good way to learn how to design when you have to work on ready-made elements. I often try to add something more from myself to develop graphic skills.”
• Andrzej also shared the source file so you can open it up to see how he created the animated effects and other slides. You can find it in the recap post.

Look at what he did, find an image, and see what you can do to apply similar effects for your own template design.

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Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Animated .gifs are great for e-learning. Often, I like to use them instead of videos for e-learning interactions, especially process interactions that go through a sequence of steps.

Here are a few previous posts on animated .gifs with some free resources:

• 3 Reasons to Use Animated GIFs in E-learning
• How to Make Animated Gifs from Video
• Here Are Some Free Animated Gifs
• How to Create Animated .GIFs for Free

Today I’ll show a simple way to convert a video of a process into smaller animated .gifs that you can insert into a slide, article, or process interaction.

Demo of the Animated Gifs in a Process Interaction

Here’s a demo I created using Rise and the Process Interaction.

Click here to view the example.

Animated Gifs Tutorials

Below are a couple of tutorials that go into it in more detail:

• How to cut the video into smaller parts using the free video editor in Windows 10.
• How to import and convert the video into an animated .gif.

Animated Gifs: Create a Procedural Video

Record a video of the process. Don’t worry about the audio as it will be removed. To keep the edits to a minimum, make sure to be clear on the steps and to not waste a lot of movement. Get to the point quickly.

At our workshop in Milan, David and I quickly recorded the process to make an espresso with the machine in the back of the room. While we pretended to be working, it was really a way for us to sneak in a few more shots of espresso.

Here’s the original video.

Click to play the video on YouTube.

Animated Gifs: Convert the Video to Gif

There are a number of ways to convert video to animated .gifs. I like to use ScreenToGif because it’s free (which is always good) and it is really easy to use.

The conversion process is simple: import the video and convert it. However, there are some key considerations.

The original .MP4 video is 159 MB at 1920 x 1080 resolution. Animated .gifs can be large, really large.  Without any significant edits, the 159 MB video becomes a 470 MB animated .gif. That’s just not manageable.

There are a few things you can do to decrease the file size of the animated .gifs:

• Scale the video down from it’s original resolution. There’s no need for an HD quality .gif. In this case 1920 x 1080 will be sized down to 500 x 281.
• Crop the video to just the critical pieces of info. The fewer frames the smaller the file size. You can always duplicate frames to keep something on screen longer with minimal impact to size.
• The less difference there is with the pixels from one frame to the next, the smaller the file will be. Unfortunately, video isn’t static and those millions of pixels are changing from frame to frame. You could try to shoot against a solid background and with a tripod. That may help, depending on your subject.
• Video runs at about 30 frames per second (FPS). When you convert the video to .gif, you can modify the frame rate to something like 10 to 15. It just depends on how much motion is in the video. The less motion, the more you can lower the frame rate.

Animated Gifs: Edit to Individual Steps

Unless the steps are very short and can be shown in one file, it makes sense to break the steps up to individual parts. That helps reduce the file size and keeps the focus on very specific parts of the process.

• You can import the entire video and then cut it down. Or cut the video into smaller videos first and work with them individually. It’s probably easier to edit the videos first and then import the smaller videos. This is more manageable and less strain on your system.
• Get rid of what you don’t need, cut out extra frames.
• The animated .gifs loop, so it may make sense to add a little buffer at the front or back end to let the user orient to the start and end of the process.

The original video was 1 minute long. Converted to an animated .gif without edits, it was 470 MB. After cutting it into pieces and creating four smaller gifs, the total ended up being about 15 MB. That’s a pretty significant difference and the output works well for the demo.

That’s basically it, shoot a video and then convert it to animated gif.

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Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Here’s a PowerPoint tip: build your e-learning course graphics in PowerPoint. PowerPoint is great for simple graphic design projects. In fact, I use it quite a bit for this blog and some of the graphics I need in my e-learning demos.

In a previous post, I shared visual design tips for graphics I built in Rise 360 for an e-learning scenario. All of those graphics were built in PowerPoint.

In this example, the images all need to be wide, but short rectangles so that I could get them about the same height as the text and squeeze them as close as possible to the button stacks in Rise 360.

I created a custom slide size 13 x 4 inches. When I save the PowerPoint slides as images that results in an image that is 1280 x 384 pixels.

Here’s a detailed tutorial that walks through the process of creating similar graphics in PowerPoint. I cover a lot of little PowerPoint tips.

Click here to view the PowerPoint tutorial on YouTube.

The links below take you to specific parts of the tutorial. The last two links show how to create the final pill shape with the character’s head extended outside of the image.

• 00:00 | Introduction
• 03:08 | How to create custom slide size
• 04:00 | Create first graphic
• 04:27 | Install Studio 360 to use the media assets (characters)
• 05:21 | Inserting and editing the character
• 06:30 | How to use the crop tool
• 07:45 | Save slide as image
• 08:50 | Experimenting with other ideas
• 09:13 | Manage layers with the selection pane
• 09:50 | Transparent echo technique
• 12:21 | How to colorize images
• 13:09 | Working with layered objects
• 14:36 | How to create the pill shape image
• 16:43 | Get the head to stick out of the picture

The tutorial above shows how I created the images. But here are a few key points to consider.

PowerPoint Tip: Step Away from PowerPoint as a Presentation Tool

If you’ve read much of this blog, you know that I’m a big advocate for using PowerPoint to build simple graphics. It’s easy to use, most people have it, and there’s not much you can’t create with PowerPoint once you learn a few things.

Is it Photoshop or Illustrator? No! And if you have expertise with those tools, then have at it. But for those who don’t have a graphics editor and need a simple solution, give PowerPoint a try.

Here are some previous posts that show what you can do:

• 5 Ways to Use PowerPoint as an Image Editor 
• How to Edit SVG Graphics in PowerPoint
• Here’s How I Built This 3D Pop-Out in PowerPoint
• A Simple Way to Build PowerPoint Graphics for Mobile Learning
• How to Create Custom Shapes in PowerPoint
• How to Create Your Own Illustrated Characters in PowerPoint
• Create Free Icons and Images in PowerPoint Using Dingbat Fonts
• How to Customize Illustrations in PowerPoint

PowerPoint Tip: Save Slides as Images

Whatever you build in PowerPoint you can right-click and save as an image. I usually save as .PNG. This preserves the color clarity and any transparency. If you save as .JPG, the transparent areas fill with white.

For most cases (especially when working with Rise 360), I like to use the slide as my entire image. So I build what I need and then save the slide as image rather than PPTX. While there are a number of image options, like above, I stick with .PNG.

PowerPoint Tip: Create Custom Slide Sizes

The default PowerPoint slide is 16 x 9 aspect ratio. In most cases that is fine. It works great for Rise 360. However, there may be times when you want a custom slide. For example, if you want a square image, you need to change the slide size. I usually use 10 inches by 10 inches which gives me an image that is close to 1000 x 1000 pixels (give or take).

Go to the Design Tab and select Slide Size to change the settings.

PowerPoint Tips: Install Studio 360

Many of you are you are using Articulate 360 which comes with Rise 360 and Storyline 360. Those are obviously the go-to apps for building courses. Because of this, many people ignore Studio 360 which comes with Articulate 360.

Even if you don’t use Studio 360 to build courses (why would you when you have Rise 360), it’s still a good idea to install it. The main reason is that you get access to all of the assets including the characters from Content Library 360. And when you build graphics for your e-learning courses, especially as I did in Rise 360, it helps to have all of the characters in PowerPoint.

If you aren’t using a graphics editor or don’t know how, then PowerPoint is a really easy way to build graphics for you e-learning courses.

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Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

The other day I made some images for a course menu page in Rise 360. I spent some time playing around with different ideas. When I reviewed my final image, I realized that there were several iterations.

Today I’ll share some of the different ideas I considered and why I made changes.

Visual Design: The Set Up

I’ll start by stating that most of this is subjective, so there’s not a right or wrong.

With this particular menu, I needed an image that had a 10:3 aspect ratio. In this case, the images are 1280 x 384. The aspect ratio calculator is a good resource if you ever need to figure out an aspect ratio or the resolution of images.

The short but wide aspect ratio creates a challenging constraint with what you can show. And that’s why I played around with different ideas.

Visual Design for E-Learning: Example 1

Because of the dimensional constraints, I started with just text. But the text looked empty and uninteresting. Since these images were part of an interactive scenario, I wanted to add a bit more personality.

I added a character to the text. This creates a visual connection to the scenario. I also wanted some white space so it was easier for the eye to scan the screen. Generally, it looks good and the white space is nice as the Rise course responds to the mobile devices.

Visual Design for E-Learning: Example 2

I wasn’t keen on the smaller character but as noted before, the height of the image created some constraints. So I played around with making the character larger. This meant is had to go off screen.

I was also concerned that perhaps the larger image would be too busy if it remained in color. So I got rid of the color and then lighten up the image a bit.

I liked the gray image and text overlay. But it just didn’t feel right, especially in the mobile view with the top of the heads cut off.

The second design is OK. But it looks a bit unbalanced. The right side of the menu has text and a strong visual element with the button. It kind of fills the right side. But the left side just looks odds to me.

Visual Design for E-Learning: Example 3

Sticking with the grayscale, I played around with making the character image a bit larger to fill that side of the menu. It does add some heft, but I wasn’t fond of the way the faces were cropped.

I do like it in the phone view because it fills the column and the lighter image with the darker buttons works.

Visual Design for E-Learning: Example 4

In a previous post, I shared an easy graphic design tip that I call the transparent echo technique. The idea is to add the same image twice. One is muted and serves as the background and the other is a focal point.

The image above was my first attempt. The examples in the blog post linked above look nice. But this one felt a bit busy and the eyes were too big. It feels a bit creepy.

So I added a color overlay that I color picked from the button. I also moved the image around and used his shirt and not the face. I like the texture that the echo creates. You can see part of the shirt so there’s some very slight visual context and the texture adds depth which I like better than just a solid color. But the echo isn’t distracting.

The design seems blocky and the buttons are heavy. My original goal was to have white space. Now I have an image design I kind of like, but it’s just too square and heavy.

Visual Design for E-Learning: Example 5

To gain white space and get rid of the block I decided to play off the pill shape of the buttons. That gives it some visual cohesion by tying in the header with the button.

By extending the heads outside the pill shape, it creates additional white space. And the round corners with the characters poking out of the shape feel a bit more organic and informal, which lends itself well to an interactive scenario course.

I also lightened the buttons so that they were a little more subdued and not as heavy. They’re just a bit lighter than the pill shape.

Visual Design Principles

Again, most of this is subjective. But I thought I’d give you some insight into my thought process as I created the graphics and made iterations. While the images are subjective, there are a few core principles to consider when creating the visuals for your courses.

• Use white space to give your eyes a break. White space also helps to discern what content is there and how’s it related to other content on the screen.
• Visual consistency between design elements. I like the final image and that it works with the pill shaped buttons. The colors also work to tie the objects together.
• Play around with color. Remove colors from the images to neutralize them. Then add a few accent pieces or a single color to draw focus. It’s easy to do and a good basic tip for those of us who are visually challenged and opt to over work our images.

In the follow up post, I’ll show how I used PowerPoint to quickly create all of these images and make edits in seconds.

Which design do you like best? Is there something you would have done different?

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As mentioned previously, I like to take part in the community’s e-learning challenges. They’re great to practice ideas and learn more about using the e-learning software.

In a recent e-learning challenge, we were asked to create a demo module and use the 2019 Pantone Color of the Year (which is Living Coral). This came at a good time, as I was pulling together some content for a workshop and wanted to show a few different ideas around color in a course’s visual design. The examples below go from subtle to “in your face.”

Visual Design Tip: Make Everything Greyscale & Use One Accent Color

One tip we share often is to make everything greyscale. And then select a single accent color. One benefit is that it tends to make the screen content look a bit more elegant. And the accent color really pops. And it gets rid of a lot of conflicting colors and helps direct the eye.

Click here to view the example.

In the example above:

• Converted the car interior image to greyscale
• Used the Pantone color for the label markers
• Used a color schemer to create a second color to complement the Pantone accent color

Often less is more, and in this case getting rid of color in the image and working with one (or two accent) colors really makes them pop and it cleans up the visual design.

Visual Design Tip: Use Silhouettes and Bold Colors

This other example is a bit more bold and in your face and it’s create to draw attention. I’d use it sparingly, but it’s great for making key points or title screens. And it’s easy to do.

Click here to view the example.

Silhouettes are easy to create from people and objects. They work best with strong contrast. I like them because their ambiguous which comes in handy for people imagery.

• Create a bold background color
• Insert a character
• Adjust the brightness and contrast settings to create either a white or black silhouette.

Check out some of the other Pantone 2019 challenge entries. If you don’t participate in the e-learning challenges, you should. You’ll learn new things and be amazed at what others create and how different everyone is in approaching the same challenge.

If you do participate, write a post and share what you learned or a technique you used to build it.

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Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Most e-learning courses have some sort of positive and negative feedback. And often we use symbols like a check or X mark to indicate good or bad.

Why not use emojis?

In a previous post, I explained when to use emojis for e-learning and three ways to insert them into your courses.

Create Free Emojis

Here’s a site where you can create free custom emojis. The site is easy to use and you can create all sorts of fun emojis to provide feedback in your courses.

Here’s quick tutorial that shows how to use the free emoji site. And here are a couple of silly examples where I use the free emojis as a way to offer hints on a slide and as a way to provide right and wrong feedback.

Click here to view the demo.

Of course the example above is silly, but you could find more creative and appropriate ways to use these free assets in your e-learning content, especially if working with a younger audience. Since the image files you get are the same dimensions, they’re perfect for buttons with various states.

If you did create some free emojis, how would you use them in your courses?

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Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Here are some free images for interactive scenarios. They go with the other free images I shared earlier. I use them for practice files in our e-learning workshops where we learn to build interactive, branched scenarios. They’re perfect for your scenario-based training and free to use.

These images are focused on hallways and such and a bit more generic with the white walls.

As you can see below, they’re perfect for staging conversations and scenarios and they work great with both the photographic and illustrated characters that come with Articulate 360.

As noted in the previous post, one tip is to add all of the images to a single file and then you can dynamically switch the backgrounds as you need. Open the master slide and create a layout for each image. Save the file as a template and you’re all set. Here’s a tutorial that shows how to create templates for reusable interactive scenarios.

Free Downloads

• Branched Scenario Background Images – Hallways
• Branched Scenario Background Images – Offices
• Branched Scenario Background Images – Illustrations

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Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Squoosh.app is a free service from Google that compresses large images. What I like is being able to compare the before and after versions of images. It’s amazing to see how advanced the compression schemes are today. Some of the images I tested were compressed down over 90% and to the naked eye the degradation was negligible without zooming.

As you can see above, the image size goes from 4.4 MB to just under 200 KB. That’s amazing. And the image below shows that the image quality is virtually the same for the naked eye.

You can learn more about the app here. Play around with the app and all of the different settings to see what you can do. Here’s a quick tutorial to see how it works.

Click here to view the tutorial on YouTube.

Final thought:

If you’re using Rise, you don’t really need to worry about compression. Rise will do the work for you. Here’s an example where I inserted the original image (4.4 MB) and the already compressed image (98 KB). In the published output, Rise compressed the original image to 100 KB and as you can see it looks great.

However, if you have a bunch of images to upload, having smaller images may speed up the time it takes to upload your files, especially if you have a slower network connection. Just something to keep in mind.

As a bonus, here’s another site that will do some image compression. And of course, you can always use something like ImageTuner to do batch conversions.

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Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

At a recent workshop we discussed the popularity of working animated gifs and how they can be used in e-learning courses. Here are three reasons you can use them in your courses.

Animated Gifs for Novel Visual Design

E-learning courses are still mostly visual. And one part of engaging you learners is to create visually rich experiences. This doesn’t replace instructional design, but it does help make your course look more interesting and contributes to capture the person’s attention.

I love this example created by one of our community managers. She did a great job using animated .gifs to enrich the visuals in her Rise demo. How many animated .gifs do you count in her demo?

Click to view the Rise demo.

Speaking of novelty, in the example below I added an animated gif to a slider that represents the module progress. At a certain point, the state of the slide thumb changes from one walking character to another.

Animated Gifs to Add Humor

One reason animated gifs are so popular is they’re perfect for sharing funny things and memes. And they’re exaggerated with the looping animations. Why not leverage the humor that these offer and work them into your courses? A couple of considerations: many of the gifs probably violate some copyright laws and training isn’t supposed to be funny. Well, maybe it can be funny, but there’s a good chance that regardless of the content someone will complain. If you do use humor, you’ll really want to make sure that it’s appropriate to your audience.

Animated Gifs to Show Procedural Steps

The two reasons above are less instructional. This next one fits better with instructional design and training. Use animated gifs to quickly show procedures or steps in a process. If you’re showing steps, it’s good to add some reference points because the content loops and people may not be clear where in the process the steps fall.

Here’s an animated gif that shows the root canal process.

Click here to view the animated gif (19 MB)

And here’s a prototype built in PowerPoint that demonstrates showing four steps.

Animated gifs work well for e-learning courses. If you use them in your courses currently, feel free to share ways that they’re used. In the meantime, check out these previous articles on creating animated gifs:

• How to Create Animated .GIFs for Free
• How to Make Animated Gifs from Video 
• Here Are Some Free Animated Gifs

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Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.