When we started this blog in 2007, PowerPoint-based elearning was all the rage, and for good reason. It was a great entry point for people just getting started, especially when the alternative was custom Flash programming that required programming skills and resources.

Today, the elearning market is different and PowerPoint elearning isn’t as important (or relevant) as it was ten years ago. It’s something I shared in this blog post on why PowerPoint isn’t the right tool for interactive elearning. With tools like Storyline, you get PowerPoint ease-of-authoring with a lot more capability and you still don’t need to learn any programming.

But that doesn’t mean PowerPoint’s obsolete. It just means that a lot of the tutorials shared over the past ten years are not as relevant as they were when they were first published, such as working with clip art (which is now defunct).

I did look through many of the older posts and here’s an updated list of PowerPoint tutorials that still come in handy if you build elearning courses  with PowerPoint; or if you want to become a PowerPoint guru and learn things like how to use it to create graphics and illustrations.

• 7 Reasons Why PowerPoint Doesn’t Suck
• 5 Must-Know PowerPoint Tips That Will Save You Time
• Here Are Two Cool PowerPoint Tips When Building Templates
• How to Create a Rapid E-Learning Tab in PowerPoint
• Clean Up Your Client’s PowerPoint Slides with This Time-Saving Tip
• 3 PowerPoint Shortcuts I Always Have at My Finger Tips
• How to Customize Illustrations in PowerPoint
• How to Create Color Schemes in PowerPoint to Match Your Brand
• Over 30 Free PowerPoint & E-Learning Templates
• How to Edit Free Vector Images in PowerPoint
• The Hidden PowerPoint Shortcut Everyone Should Know
• How to Be More Productive When Using PowerPoint to Create E-Learning Courses
• 5 PowerPoint E-Learning Tips & A Free Template
• Top PowerPoint Tips
• Create Custom Shapes in PowerPoint
• How to Create Your Own Illustrated Graphics in PowerPoint
• How to Create Your Own Illustrated Characters in PowerPoint
• Here’s How to Create Your Own E-Learning Template in PowerPoint
• How to Use PowerPoint to Create Custom Stock Images
• Want to Become a Rapid E-Learning Pro? Then Check Out All of These PowerPoint Tips
• Does Your Client Need to Know You’re Using PowerPoint?
• How to Create an Interactive PowerPoint Elearning Module
• More Than 30 PowerPoint Tips from the PowerPoint Pros!
• More Than 100 PowerPoint Tutorials & a Free Template

There are some really good PowerPoint tips and tricks in that list. Even if you can’t go through them all, make sure to bookmark them for quick reference.

What’s your favorite PowerPoint tip learned via these blog posts over the years? Feel free to share them via the comments.

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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.

Adding placeholder text is one of those tasks that we do a lot when building our course screen layouts or templates. It helps us make sure things are looking right before we spent too much time building out the real content.

In today’s post I’ll share three easy ways to add placeholder text to your elearning courses.

Use the Built-in Lorem Ipsum Generator

PowerPoint, Articulate Studio, and Storyline offer built-in lorem ipsum generators so that it’s really easy to add some placeholder content. Here are the steps:

• Add a text box
• Type in =lorem() 
• Hit enter

That will create a good amount of random placeholder text. However, it may be more than you need. That’s OK because you have some flexibility.

You can add numbers inside the parenthesis to control how many paragraphs and sentences are presented. For example, =lorem(2,1) will give you two paragraphs with one sentence each.

Here’s a tutorial that shows how to create random text in PowerPoint. The process is exactly the same in Storyline, but you use lorem instead of rand.

Use an Online Lorem Ipsum Generator

There are a lot of online lorem ipsum generators. Just do a search and you’ll find more than you need. I like the ones where you can generate placeholder text in other languages, too. This is another good one because you can set word count and choose Kafka text which is perfect for bureaucratic, compliance training. It may even be possible to use nothing but Kafka for your real training and have no one notice.

If all you need is lorem ipsum text, then the built-in tools are fine. Why go to a website to find something you already get in the elearning applications? However, some people don’t like the lorem ipsum text and want real readable text. Or they don’t like the fact that the lorem ipsum text doesn’t get past the spellchecker.

That’s OK, too, because there are sites that create random text that is also legible. And some of them are funny. Here are a few:

• Bacon ipsum: lots of meat. Perfect if your subject matter expert is Ron Swanson.
• Veggie ipsum: for you vegans and vegetarians.
• Hipster ipsum: hipster paragraphs perfect for your millennial reviewers.
• Gangsta lorem ipsum: can’t go wrong with a little izzle on your ipsum lorizzle.
• Fillerati: text from classic literature for the more educated amongst us.
• Meet the Ipsums: a big long list of goofy ipsum generators.

Use a Lorem Ipsum Browser Extension

Why go to a website to get your placeholder text? Why not just grab some from right within your browser? There are a number of browser extensions that offer quick lorem ipsum text. Just click on the extension and copy and paste your placeholder text.

Here are a few that I’ve used in Chrome. I’m sure that the other browsers have something similar.

• Lorem ipsum
• Lorem ipsum generator
• Corporate ipsum
• Dummy text

As you can see, there are more than enough ways to generate fake text and with the amount you need for your slides. And of course, make sure that you let your subject matter expert know it’s fake text so that they don’t ask why you localized the course before getting final approval.

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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.

As you know, the Articulate community regularly shares all sorts of free downloads. We have elearning templates, free PowerPoint templates, graphics, and all other sorts of free assets that can be used for your elearning courses. Also, you are free to use them for your projects without attribution.

On top of that, many of your peers in the industry and elearning community regularly share free downloads. For today’s post I’d like to feature a few of them. Take advantage of what they offer and be sure to let them know you appreciate the files.

Joanna Kurpiewska

• Joanna Kurpiewska
• Get free templates here.

Alexander Salas

• Alexander Salas
• Get free templates here.

Linda Lorenzetti

• Linda Lorenzetti
• Get free templates here.

Jackie Van Nice

• Jackie Van Nice
• Get free templates here.

Montse Posner Anderson

• Montse Posner Anderson
• Get free templates here.

Matt Guyan

• Matthew Guyan
• Get free templates here.

Veronica Budnikas

• Veronica Budnikas
• Get free templates here.

Dianne Hope

• Dianne Hope
• Get free templates here.

Tracy Carroll

• Tracy Carroll
• Get free templates here.

Jeff Kortenbosch

• Jeff Kortenbosch
• Get free templates here.

Punab Parab

• Punam Parab
• Get free templates here.

Ashley Chiasson

• Ashley Chiasson
• Get free templates here.

Mike Taylor

• Mike Taylor
• Get free templates here.

Nancy Woinoski

• Nancy Woinoski
• Get free templates here.

Paul Alders

• Paul Alders
• Pending.

John Toh

• John Toh
• Get free templates here.

Meaghan Lister

• Meaghan Lister
• Get free templates here.

I’m sure there are more in the community who have freely shared their resources. If you share free elearning templates in the community, feel free to add a link in the comments. The only stipulations are that they’re original content, not spam, free to use for commercial work, and don’t require an account or some sort of login to access the free resources.

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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.

One of my favorite ways to learn is by deconstructing what others do. It allows me to find new ways to do things. And even though I’ve been doing this stuff for a while, there’s always something to learn.

A couple of weeks ago, Creative Markets, gave away this PowerPoint template. Looks like it’s no longer free. It’s a nice template with a lot of useful layouts.

But there were two things that I really liked about the template and how they approached their production. So in today’s post we’ll look at what they did and learn to apply it to your own templates.

I created a PowerPoint tutorial that goes through both tips in more detail.

PowerPoint Tip: Use Pattern Fills for Image Placeholders

In PowerPoint, we can create all sorts of master slide layouts and add a whole host of placeholders. One type is the image placeholder.

Since the placeholder is designed to hold an image, when you don’t insert an image on the slide, it may end up looking like a big empty spot. And this could be confusing because people may anticipate that an object is going to be there and when it doesn’t show, they may think something is broken.

What I like about this template by Dublin Design is that they filled the image placeholders with a pattern fill. If you add an image, the pattern is replaced with the image. However, if you choose to not add an image, the pattern becomes a subtle part of the slide design. Very clever.

PowerPoint Tip: Use Merge Shapes Feature to Create Custom Image Fills

This is the tip that really caught my eye. They created a fill shape that was very unique and adds a lot more pizzazz to the design. It also helps you see the image placeholders in a new way.

Created editable shapes

When you insert an image placeholder it’s rectangular. However, if you right-click you’ll notice that you cannot edit its points. To change this, go to Edit Shape and select the rectangle shape. Now when you right click, the placeholder acts more like a regular shape and you have the option to modify the edit points and make the shape anything you want it to be.

Merge shapes to create unique placeholders

Starting with PowerPoint 2010, there are some merge shapes features. In PowerPoint 2010, you’ll need to add them to your ribbon toolbar. In PowerPoint 2013, they’re under the Drawing Tools’ Format ribbon.

Create an image placeholder on the master slide layout. Then insert a different shape. Use the Merge Shapes feature to create unique image placeholders.

Again, here’s a PowerPoint tutorial that walks through the steps in more detail.

There you have it, two cool PowerPoint tips to help you the next time you build an elearning template in PowerPoint.

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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.

I’m a big fan of community and how it helps us learn from each other. This is especially important for those of us in the elearning industry.

If you are a financial analyst, odds are that there are a number of seasoned financial analysts in your organization who could draw from their experience and offer you all sorts of tips. Often that’s not true for elearning. Many of us work on small teams and don’t have access to seasoned pros. And that’s why community is so important for us.

The Value of the E-Learning Community

Community isn’t content. Instead its about learning from each other while we exchange tips, best practices, and share resources. It’s a means to help you grow. You’ll expand your support network and build your expertise (and eventually your reputation among your peers).

Here’s one example of how this happens in the community.

I think one of the best ways to learn to build better courses is by reviewing and deconstructing what others do. When I facilitate elearning workshops I routinely show the examples created for the community’s weekly elearning challenges. They’re authentic and created by real community members.

What I like about the modules is that I often learn something new. There are a number of occasions where I spend time deconstructing the demo trying to figure out how it was created. Sometimes I can’t, which bugs me. But most of the times I learn some new production techniques or a new way to think about the software.

Today I’d like to feature one of the community members who does a great job representing what’s good about community and how to participate in a way that’s meaningful and useful to others.

The E-Learning Community Shares Out-of-the-Box Ideas

I met Joanna Kurpiewska a few years ago at a workshop in London. She shared a little about her trajectory in the industry, some of her ideas, and what she hoped to accomplish. It’s really exciting to see how well she’s done over that time and to know that we played a small role in that.

There were two recent challenges where the demos she submitted were pretty cool.

Click here to view the slider demo.

The first challenge above was on using the slider feature in Storyline. The one Joanna did really stood out to me. First, it wasn’t a typical looking slider and second, it introduced a novel way to navigate the course, essentially removing the need for a previous and next button.

Click here to view the player demo.

The second challenge above was on creating a customized player. Again, the submissions were pretty creative and introduced some neat ideas. Check them out.

There were a few things that I like about Joanna’s submission. I like the informality of it with the cluttered desktop, the informal font, the lottery ticket link, and the structure of the next button. I also like the way she colored the player and filled the presenter image area with the Polaroid graphics to push the player out a bit.

Joanna’s not the only one who submitted creative ideas, so be sure to look at some of the other demos.

The key point is that your peers who share their work in the elearning community will help you see things in a new light and expand your understanding of what you can do (and possibly do it in new ways).

The E-Learning Community Shares What They Learn

As you know, I’m a big fan of PowerPoint and using it to create your own custom illustrations. I’ve featured that capability in a number of posts, such as this one.

In the past Joanna’s done something similar where she’s shared how she creates some of her own illustrations:

• How to Create Custom Icons in PowerPoint (free download)
• How to Create Gamified or Award Badges in PowerPoint (free download)

Recently she shared a great demo on how to create custom callouts and speech bubbles. You can read the article here and watch the tutorial video on YouTube. And of course, there’s a free download for those who want the files.

The E-Learning Community Establishes Your Authority

If you look at Joanna’s community profile you can see she regularly participates in the challenges and shows her work. She also freely shares her expertise by answering questions, doing tutorials, and making her source files and assets available for free. And she also maintains her own blog where she does even more of the same.

All of this activity allows her to build her own brand and expertise outside of the community. This is important because it allows your community activity to bleed over into your elearning portfolio which may lead to a stronger network of peers, more professional contacts, and potential business opportunities.

I know many people in the community who do the same thing and it’s paid dividends as they get all sorts of inquiries for freelance work.

What’s in it for me?

Community is all about practitioners getting together and learning from each other. The ultimate goal is to build expertise in the given domain, which in this case is using the Articulate elearning software and becoming a better elearning course designer.

This sharing and learning from each other is authentic and not manipulative. It’s not a marketing vehicle to sell your services and templates (which unfortunately some of the community members don’t quite get yet).

That’s why I chose to focus on Joanna, because I met her and know her story. What she shares and how she engages in the community is based on acquiring and sharing expertise. The modules that show off her skills and the free assets that she shares are merely artifacts, a by-product of what’s happening as she’s engaged with the community.

Are you stuck in a cubicle building the same course over and over thinking that the elearning world is passing you by? Do you want do something different and be connected to people who can help you grow? Then think about participating in the community. Even if you can’t answer questions or participate in the elearning challenges, at least make it a point to see what’s going on. And it’s easy to stay on top of that by following the weekly recaps.

Come join us and let’s learn together.

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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.

When I review vector images, I like to review the other images from the same artist. This way when I need to build a module or template, I can find assets drawn in the same style. This lets me deconstruct the vector illustration and use the parts to create illustrations that meet my own need. And remember, if you don’t have an illustration app, as long as you can get .EPS vector files, you can edit them in PowerPoint.

The other day I ran across this series of vector images that would work in an elearning course. Here are some things that work for an elearning template:

• Avatar: the circled avatar is a common design treatment.
• Progress meter: using variables allows you to combine various levels of feedback or progress. The meters could also be some sort of slider interaction.
• Circled content: these are nice buckets that could easily be used as a start screen or menu structure. They also could be replacements for bullet point content.
• Header bar: again, another common design treatment.

Most of the elements are pretty simple to create. The challenge is creating the circle avatar effect using your own images. Fortunately, it’s easy to do.

PowerPoint Tutorials

I’ve included a couple of tutorials to show how to create the circle avatar effect and how to work with connectors. This will work in Storyline or PowerPoint.

• How to work with connected shapes in PowerPoint. Some quick tips and tutorial on how to create additional connection points in PowerPoint shapes.
• How to create the circled avatar effect in PowerPoint and in Storyline.

And to make things easier, here’s a free template. All you need to do is add your own content and characters.

Free PowerPoint & E-Learning Templates

Click here to see an example.

I created a few simple layouts to help you get started. You’ll need to create the circle avatar effect using one the tutorials above. The template is also connected to the design color themes and font themes for easy editing.

The layouts are just a starting point. If you want to add interactive elements like I did in the Storyline demo above, you’ll need to make your own tweaks. I’ll include the demo file in the same download for you to see what I did.

Free Downloads

• Free PowerPoint template
• Free Storyline 2 template

Hope you enjoy the free templates and tutorials.

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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 are some scenario background images that are great for your next interactive branched e-learning scenario course. These backgrounds go really well with the illustrated characters that come with the Articulate applications or those you may find at some of the free vector image sites.

I got the original backgrounds by ungrouping some old PowerPoint clip art (unfortunately no longer available). After ungrouping them, I made some modifications so they’d work with the branched e-learning scenarios. Of course, these images are relatively simple to make using basic shapes in PowerPoint or Storyline or by downloading some free vector images and making your own edits.

Be sure to check out these free office images for branched scenarios, too.

Breaking Down the Free Background Images

The image files are saved in the master slides as distinct layouts. To change from one background to the next, just go to the Home>Layout tab and select the layout you want to use. If you want to make edits to the backgrounds, you’ll need to do so from the master slide.

Once you have a background layout selected, add one of the illustrated characters. I like to play around with different sizes and cropping. There are a lot of ways to display the characters so feel free to play around with different looks.

The download file includes the template and the background images to be used with branched e-learning scenarios.

• Download Storyline file
• Download PowerPoint file

If you use the backgrounds, be sure to let me know how they work for you. Enjoy.

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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.

As you know, we have all sorts of free templates to download for your elearning courses and PowerPoint presentations. The challenge sometimes is figuring out when and how to use the templates for your own projects.

At a recent conference I was chatting with someone who wanted to make her software training look better. Her training was mostly a series of quick video tutorials. She wanted a nice way to present the tutorials. I recommended that she start with one of the free templates and use it as a way to package the tutorials.

Here’s a quick mock up I created for her using a template I gave away in a recent blog post.

Click here to view the demo.

You’ll notice that the free template is a little different than the final product. That’s because the free template is just the starting point. You don’t want the template design to dictate how you’ll build your course. So feel free to make the modifications that help you meet your project objectives.

• In this particular template I got rid of the different sized boxes and created the same size box for each video title.
• I also covered up the connectors lines that were a little busy-looking and possibly distracting.
• The slide layers were also cleaned out to accommodate the videos and playbar. These videos work fine in the preset size. Otherwise I would have set the player to scale up so the end user could make the videos larger.

Here’s a quick video tutorial where I show some of the changes I made to the template so that it worked for my demo. Hopefully that’ll give you some ideas on making your own modifications.

Click here to view the tutorial video.

For the most part, software training centers on explainer videos. In those cases, the template is a frame to hold the videos. What I look for is a good starting page that can serve as a menu or sorts and then space to hold the individual videos.

Here are some other templates I think would work great for software training.

• I like the bookshelf metaphor. The shelves can represent sections and the books are smaller teaching chunks. Each book cover would link to a video.

• Any tabs interaction would work well. The tabs are the menu and they link to the videos. Tabs also make efficient use of the screen space.

• Here’s another example of the free template, Business Circles, modified to add some gamified mechanics for a new hire orientation.

There are all sorts of great templates to use for your elearning courses and software training. Find a template and use it to create your next software training.

If you do, be sure to tell us how it went. Any particular template that you’d use for your software training?

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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 a free elearning template I created for a recent workshop. I used it to highlight a few key production tips, which you’ll find below. The free template includes three interactions: two timelines and one process interaction.

Free E-Learning Template Example

Click here to view an example of the free template.

• Download the free elearning template here.
• Here’s a simplified PowerPoint version of the timeline: demo and download.

Timeline Interaction 1

The first timeline interaction features segments with dots that represent events. Click the dot and it reveals a layer with all of the events for that particular segment.

Timeline Interaction 2

The second timeline looks similar to the first. However, each dot has it’s own content layer. This opens up more space for event-specific content. Also, the dot shows a visited state after selecting it.

Process Interaction

The process interaction is a bonus that I created to show how quickly the objects can be moved around to create a different type of interaction.

Key Learning Points

Here are some of the things I pointed out in the workshop:

• Keep with basic shapes when creating interactions. They’re easy to re-use, copy, and modify. Especially when you want to duplicate functionality.
• Format painter is your friend because you just need to format one shape and apply it to the next.
• Animations and transitions work if they’re not superfluous or too dramatic.
• Play around with layouts and template ideas. In this example, I matched the top part of the screen to the player color so it looks like the header blends into the player.
• Naming is important. Notice how the object titles and layers match? This makes setting up triggers really easy. And if you need to troubleshoot it’s easier to spot if a connection is wrong.

Hope you enjoy the template or use it to inspire your own.

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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.

In a previous post I mentioned how to find color schemes using color schemers.  They’re great tools to help find the right color palette for your courses. Personally I find them valuable because I have slight color blindness. So having a system that keeps me in line really helps.

Use the Color Picker to Manually Create Color Schemes

Another way to create color schemes to manually pick colors from an image. In the tutorials I did for Storyline, I show how to use the color picker to pick colors from a background image.

With the color picker, I get colors that match colors from the image on the slides. Look at the image below. The tabs and side panel were color picked from the building on the right of the background image. I also added a colored, semi-transparent shape over the background to add some tinting and subdue the background a bit.

You’re not limited to Storyline, you can also do the same thing in PowerPoint.

Create Color Schemes from a Picture or Logo

Instead of creating a color scheme by manually picking colors, you can create one from the colors in an image. Upload an image and then let the color scheming site create a color palette for you.

• Color Hunter: upload an image
• Color Palette Generator: add an image URL to create the scheme
• Kuler: upload an image or create custom themes using formulas; requires an account
• Pictalous: upload an image and get advice from multiple sites
• Colrd: upload an image and identify your image DNA

Some of you have corporate style guides where the color information is provided. If you don’t have a formal style guide, you can upload a company-related image and have the color scheming site generate a usable palette.

As the image above shows, I uploaded a screen capture of my blog to pull together a color scheme. This is something you can do, too. You can use one of the following:

• Company web site. Take a screenshot of your company website (or something else). Upload it to one of these sites and capture a color palette.
• Company logo. Use the company logo to do the same thing.
• Marketing collateral. You may have marketing or product material that you can use to pull a color palette.

Once you have a color palette, use it to create custom color themes in PowerPoint and Storyline.

As you can see, creating a custom color palette is pretty easy. And once you have one, you can customize your course to your heart’s content.

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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.

2015 was another great year in an industry that’s still really hot. I hope you had a great year, too. Here’s a rundown of some of this year’s rapid elearning goodness.

Things You Need to Know

Before we review the best elearning posts for 2015, here are some important things related to this blog and the community.

• Don’t use Google Drive to share courses. Many of you participate in the weekly challenges and use Google Drive to host and share the courses. That needs to change because Google is removing that option and all of the courses you share will no longer work. Here are a few other options for hosting courses. If I were sharing courses, I’d create my own domain and manage it that way. It’s less than $10/month.
• Microsoft finally got rid of clip art. You’ll either need to hire someone to do your graphics, buy into a graphics vendor, or create your own. You can also download free assets from the community or other sites and learn to edit them in PowerPoint.
• Articulate Guru Winners. I want to give props to this year’s Articulate Guru winners and encourage you to check out what they created. We also have all sorts of great elearning examples and weekly challenge modules to view. They’re great for ideas and inspiration.

Best E-Learning Posts for 2015

Here is a solid collection of blog posts for those getting started with elearning and who want to learn more.

• Top Instructional Design Tips
• How Organizations Ruin Their Online Training Programs
• How to Improve Your E-Learning Skills
• How to Apply Visual Thinking to Course Design
• What’s the Right Length for E-Learning Courses?
• How to Create Successful Training
• Get Your Learners to Help You Build Better Training
• Build One Course that Meets Many Needs
• Create Better Interactive Scenarios
• Speed Things Up with Pre-Assessment Scenarios
• How to Edit All of Those Free Vector Images
• Build Your E-Learning Skills with These Tips
• Find Free Stock Images with this Search Site
• 5 Ways to Engage Your Learners
• How to Get Started Building E-Learning Courses
• Why PowerPoint Isn’t the Right Choice for Interactive E-Learning

Best E-Learning Posts with Free Downloads

We all love free stuff so here’s a list of all the 2015 blog posts with free assets, applications, and templates.

• Simple Interactive Scenario Template
• 45 Free Stock Images
• Free Hand-drawn Objects
• 80 Free Stock Images
• New Hire Orientation Template
• Free E-Learning E-Book
• Free Closed Captioning Applications
• Free Vector Image Sites
• Free People Icons
• 60 Free Stock Images
• Interactive Conversation Template
• Circle Lift Presentation Template
• Interactive Zooming Office Template
• Interactive Image Template
• Over 30 Free PowerPoint Templates
• Even More Free Stock Images
• A Complete List of Free Stock Image Sites
• 24 Free Tabs Templates
• Free Office Interaction Template
• Interactive Check Mark Template

I’m excited about 2016 and hope you are, too. Have a great one!

Events

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.

At a recent workshop I showed the difference between creating interactive elearning in PowerPoint and Storyline. For the workshop I created a few different templates. One of them was a tabs interaction. Following is the free PowerPoint template and the corresponding Storyline version. You can use them as you wish.

Free Interactive Tabs Template

• Click here to view the template in action.
• Click here to download the free template.

Free PowerPoint Template

• Click here to view the template in action: side tabs or top tabs.
• Click here to download the free PowerPoint templates.

Production Tips

I usually get questions on how to edit the free templates and make them interactive. Here are a few tips:

• Leverage the master slides. Try to put as much persistent content on the slide master as you can. Sometimes you don’t know what’s persistent until you’re done. That’s OK. At that point, it’s worth adding it to the master slide and then deleting it from the slides. You’ll be glad you did it when you need to edit the slides later.
• Learn to work with hyperlinks in PowerPoint because interactions in PowerPoint mostly work the same way: they are hyperlinks to other slides. Also, hyperlinks work on master slides. Storyline’s a lot easier because you can create triggers to slide layers and add more interactive features.
• Start by downloading some of the many free templates and deconstructing them. That’s an easy way to learn.

Events

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.