At one high-tech company I worked for, we turned a standup based on PowerPoint into an effective online course by simply writing a lot of questions and inserting them in between the slides and providing e-mail links to the Subject Matter Expert for help. The lesson objective was to explain the competitive advantages of lower power consumption in programmable semiconductor chips.

My key strategy for making a passive slide show into an interesting course with the minimum amount of work was to insert hard questions between every slide or two. The questions were not recall level, but required the learner to synthesize enabling objectives and apply new learning to slightly different scenarios from the ones presented.

The course was converted from PowerPoint to online with Authorware. The slides were imported as passive GIFs, and the questions were created with simple multiple choice and fill-in templates. Full answer judging with two levels of feedback and complete explanations of the answer were provided. One important point is that a full explanation of the answer should always be provided for both correct and incorrect answers, to make sure those answering correctly really understand why the answer is correct.

I learned from this course that elaborate multimedia content will not interest professionals nearly as much as difficult questions based on real-life scenarios or cases. The users were most complimentary about the questions they had the hardest time answering. If they perceived the question as being relevant and realistic, but they could not answer it without discussing it with their peers, they thought that was really cool. So, it was their own effort that made the training interesting, not the bells and whistles of the presentation. Of course, this was an audience of engineers, so you can't generalize to all audiences.