Converting PowerPoint to e-learning: how it works

Presentations are the most common source material for e-learning. Almost every organisation has hundreds of slide decks: product training, onboarding, lectures, briefings. It is tempting simply to upload them and distribute them as a course. The result usually disappoints, because a presentation is only half of a talk.

The other half was the speaker. They explained, told examples, answered questions and stressed what mattered. Without them you are left with keywords, charts without commentary and slides that only made sense in context. Converting to e-learning therefore mainly means replacing this missing speaker and adding active elements to passive viewing.

Before you convert, review the deck. Remove outdated slides, duplicates and slides that only made sense in a particular talk, such as a welcome, the agenda for a specific day or a note about the coffee break. Check images and graphics for usage rights, because a course is permanently available and reaches more people than an internal talk.

Speaker notes are a real treasure. If the original presenter left notes, they often contain exactly the explanation missing from the slide. They are the best starting point for the later narration.

Arrange the slides into short modules with one objective each. A ninety-minute talk becomes five or six modules that can be worked through individually. Write narration for each slide that explains what the slide shows, and cut the text on the slide down to the essentials.

Then add what a talk did not have: questions along the way, short exercises, examples to try and a final assessment if proof is needed. Watch the animations. Whatever appeared step by step in the talk should also appear in time with the explanation in the course, not all at once.

A course built from slides lives on its voice. Options are your own recording, a professional voice actor or a synthetic voice. Your own recordings feel personal but are laborious to change, because every correction needs a new recording. Synthetic voices can be regenerated at any time when a sentence changes and can be carried over into many languages.

A visible speaker, such as an avatar next to the slide, can hold attention and keep the feel of a talk. What matters is that it does not cover the slide and that AI-generated speakers are labelled as such.

Depending on the goal, the finished course reaches learners in different forms. In a learning platform it runs in the course player with progress, questions and records. As an MP4 video it plays anywhere but loses its interactivity. As a SCORM package it runs in another LMS and reports progress and completion there. And as a PPTX with speaker notes or as a PDF it remains editable or printable.

In Universe you drag the presentation into the workshop; it is read, the topics are identified and a course with modules and slides is proposed. Each slide gets narration and visuals, an avatar presents, and the speaker’s placement is proposed per slide and approved by the author. Courses are published in the course player and can be downloaded as one video per module or one continuous video, as a presentation file with speaker notes, as a PDF or as a SCORM 1.2 package. The trial author account lets you try this with your own presentation.