From Powerpoint to mindmaps
Pascale Delchevalerie is both a nurse and a trainer at MSF (Doctors Without Borders). She was selected to provide systematic training on children nutrition and feeding centers because of her scientific and field expertise.
She is recognised as a top trainer, always structuring the topic, giving examples of what she is talking about and addressing questions from the audience in a sensitive and concise way.
Pascale's ability to express things visually and mime with objects captivates her audience. Her lessons include hands-on demonstrations and workshops with medical hardware (Salter scales, baby dolls, Blood transfusion devices...).
MSF goes e-learning
MSF decided to build blended learning courses on top of this expertise. The principle, designed by Annick Filot, e-learning manager at MSF Brussels, was to create a series of online Cases studies (describing the various types of malnutrition) and provide short theoretical insights in the feedback of the questions.
Theoretical insights consist of:
- short video explanations where Pascale handles hardware, comments symptoms pictures, draws diagrams with her finger in the sand
- screencasts, i.e. basic animations whith a static diagram + mouse movements synchronised with audio comments.
This static diagram has to integrate various dimensions so as to provide a reliable basis for the animations. It should:
- Express things visually;
- Describe diagnostic processes and treatment sequences;
- Strike by its simplicity;
- Articulate keywords and images to help the student understand and memorize;
- Recycle the Powerpoint slide information but exclude all the parts of this information that will be part of the audio comment;
- Not look like the other diagrams, so that each diagram prints in the student mind with a different shape;
- Embed the synthesis of the speech so that the student mentally hears the audio comment when preparing the exam;
- Be created rapidly (2 hours by diagram) and not require the help of an art designer, for economic reasons;
- Allow Pascale to progressively create her own diagrams without external help.
The limits of Powerpoint
As trainers, we are often led to present things visually. The problem is that we have no expertise in the visual. We are not art designers nor phtographers and tools like Photoshop or Illustrator are far too complex for us.
Hence Powerpoint. With Powerpoint, weare able to:
- list text items;
- draw arrows and boxes;
- mix text with images;
- draw simple diagrams.
Here is one of the Powerpoint slides we started from to build the mindmaps.
The main problem with Powerpoint is that this software does not help us to:
- organize ideas;
- find the relevant illustration;
- articulate text with speech, replacing sentences by keywords and icons.
Uses of mindmapping in e-learning
This is where mindmapping enters the play. With the mindmapping methodology and an adequate free software like Xmind, Pascale was able (well, yes we helped a little bit at start...) to encapsulate her fantastic visual creativity, moving from a Powerpoint basic presentation to a visual and synthetic expression.
Whether you build classroom training or e-learningcourses, mindmaps will help you describe and organize things visually and combine visual and speech in a well-balanced way.
In an e-learning course, your maps will:
- serve as a background for a basic mouse+audio animation or screencast;
- be clickable in a hotspots test (you will have removed the keywords from the map) with questions like "Click on the device that will administer the Darrow's solution (and the answer is to click on the syringe);
- appear at the end of the course with no audio as a synthesis to prepare the exam;
- be printed for the student as a kind of paper summary of the online course.
You can also invite the students to build their own mindmaps as a hands-on workshop, and even share them through the learning platform as a collaborative practice.
The use of mindmaps in learning processes has no other limit than your imagination.
See also