Lesson 5: Developing Instructional Materials

1. Introduction

In this lesson, you will learn how to develop instructional materials that align with the Webinar Lesson Plan created in Lesson 4. The instructional materials will include presenter’s narrative and presentation slides. 

Although the process is not as easy as waving a magic wand, you have done much of the preliminary work already. In your lesson plan, you have described all the learning components you will include in your webinar. Now you need to create the instructional content and presentation materials. 

For the example, we use PowerPoint as the delivery tool since it is commonly used for webinar training. However, you can use any tool you prefer. PowerPoint design techniques are not covered in this lesson since there are many resources already available on that topic.

2. Presentation Structure

First, let's start by creating a slide deck template that follows the organizational structure of our lesson plan. It includes a slide for each of the sections as defined by Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction. It is the starting point for your presentation. You will modify it by adding content and slides as necessary. However, you should still follow its basic structure as it represents the structure of your instructional strategy.

Note: You can download this Webinar PowerPoint Template to help design your lesson plan instead of the one we used in the last lesson. By doing this, you have essentially identified the slides you will be using and can proceed to write the narrative content for your presentation.

Slide Deck Template

3. Draft Presentation

A draft presentation for our instruction was developed using our example lesson plan and the slide deck. This draft provides the basic structure and information needed to guide development of the presentation.

View the First Draft of the Sample Webinar. (After viewing, click your browser's back button to return to the course.)

4. Final Presentation

The first draft of the presentation is very minimal. It only includes the descriptions from the lesson plan in the notes area of the appropriate slides. 

This simple draft, however, does provide a framework for completing the instructional narrative and presentation slides. How to develop the narrative is not part of this course and is dependent on the instructor's knowledge of the material. Just keep in mind though that the narrative should only include information needed to enable achievement of the learning objectives. Development of the visual aspects of the presentation is also not covered in this course. 

With all of that said, it is now time to unveil the final presentation from our sample lesson plan. It utilizes many of the best practices taught in this course. It includes the presenter narrative in the notes section for each slide. It also indicates in the notes section the Gagne's Nine Events to which the slide applies. Studying it closely should give you ideas for developing your own instructional materials.

View the Final Sample Webinar Slides. 

5. Practice Exercise

As you learned in this course, there comes a time when the student must apply what they have learned in a real-world setting. 

Your next steps are to develop the narrative for your instruction and develop your PowerPoint presentation. You can download the Webinar PowerPoint Template and use your lesson plan to begin the process. You should now be able to apply what you have learned in this course about webinar best practices, using interactivity to engage participants, and instructional design principles to develop effective webinar instruction.