Perspective
Your SME Gave You 74 Slides. Now What?
The content dump is not the learning plan. Before you start converting slides into screens, sort the material by what people actually need to know, practice, use, find, or forget.
There is a moment almost every instructional designer recognizes.
The SME sends you the deck.
Maybe it is 47 slides. Maybe it is 74. Maybe it is a PowerPoint, three policy documents, two recordings, a spreadsheet, and an email that says, “I know this is a lot, but they really need to know all of it.”
Then comes the request: “Can you turn this into training?”
The content dump is where a lot of bad training begins
Sometimes the SME has already designed the learning experience for you.
“This slide needs to stay.”
“They need to memorize this.”
“Can you add a quiz here?”
“We should make this interactive.”
“I took a course once where you clicked on the different parts of a graphic. Can we do something like that?”
None of this makes the SME the enemy. They are usually trying to help. They care about the subject, they know where people make mistakes, and they may have years of experience the designer does not.
But deep expertise creates its own blind spots. When you know something well, it becomes difficult to remember what it felt like not to know it. Important context can feel obvious. Rare exceptions can feel essential. Every detail can seem worth teaching because every detail matters somewhere.
The SME's job is to help us understand the work. Our job is to decide what the learning experience should ask people to do with that knowledge.
Subject-matter expertise and learning-design expertise are different
This distinction matters because instructional designers often surrender it too easily.
We are handed source material and begin organizing it. Slides become screens. Bullet points become tabs. Definitions become flash cards. A few multiple-choice questions appear at the end. Maybe we add a scenario so the experience feels more applied.
The result can be polished, accurate, and completely faithful to the SME's material.
It can also be the wrong solution.
Accuracy is essential, but accuracy does not tell us what belongs in training. The more useful questions are about performance.
What do people need to do differently? What decisions do they need to make? What mistakes matter? What information needs to be recalled without help? What can be available at the moment of need? What is useful background but unnecessary for performance?
Those questions turn a content review into a design decision.
I would sort the content into five buckets
Before opening an authoring tool, I want every meaningful piece of the content to earn its place. A simple way to begin is to sort it into five buckets.
Teach it
Use this bucket for knowledge people genuinely need to understand or recall in order to perform. Not information that is merely interesting, complete, or important to the SME. Information that changes what the person can do.
Ask: What would fail if the learner did not understand this?
Practice it
This is where learning starts looking like work. If people need to make a decision, perform a task, recognize a condition, respond to ambiguity, or exercise judgment, explanation is not enough.
Ask: What should the learner actually get better at doing?
Support it
Some information matters, but memorizing it is unnecessary. A checklist, job aid, decision tree, searchable resource, template, or workflow cue may be more useful than another module.
Ask: Could the person perform successfully if this information were available at the moment of need?
Reference it
Some content belongs in the ecosystem without belonging in the learning experience. Policy language, technical detail, edge cases, background information, and deeper explanations can remain available for people who need them.
Ask: Does everyone need this now, or does someone need to be able to find it later?
Cut it
This is usually the uncomfortable bucket.
Some content exists because it has always been in the deck. Some exists because an executive likes it. Some is there because the SME spent six months creating it. Some demonstrates expertise without helping the learner perform.
Ask: What happens to performance if we remove this?
If the answer is “nothing,” that tells us something.
The five-bucket test
Teach it. Practice it. Support it. Reference it. Cut it. The goal is not to make the SME's deck shorter. The goal is to decide what the work actually requires.
The five buckets change the SME conversation
“We should cut slides 36 through 52” is an invitation to fight about content.
“Help me understand what someone needs to do with this information on the job” is a different conversation.
Now the SME can do what they are uniquely qualified to do: explain the work.
Where do people struggle? What do experienced employees notice that beginners miss? What decisions have consequences? Which mistakes are recoverable? Which are expensive or dangerous? What information changes frequently? What resources do strong performers already use?
The designer can then translate that expertise into the right mix of instruction, practice, feedback, performance support, reference material, and sometimes no learning intervention at all.
Good SME partnership is not about winning control of the course. It is about combining two kinds of expertise without pretending they are the same.
AI can make the sorting faster. It should not make the decision for you.
This is exactly the kind of messy source-material problem where AI can be useful.
It can inventory a large deck. It can identify repetition. It can summarize themes. It can extract procedures, decisions, terminology, exceptions, and policy statements. It can help organize a pile of SME notes into something a designer can inspect.
What I would not do is upload 74 slides and ask, “Turn this into a course.”
That simply automates the conversion mistake.
A better use of AI is to accelerate the analysis while keeping the practitioner responsible for the judgment. Let the machine help you see the content. Then decide what deserves to become learning based on the performance you are trying to support.
The value is not in converting content anymore
This matters even more as AI gets better at production.
Turning a PowerPoint into screens is becoming easier. Writing quiz questions is easier. Creating narration is easier. Generating graphics, scenarios, interactions, and even working course code is becoming easier.
If our professional value is primarily the ability to convert SME content into learning artifacts, we are choosing to compete in the part of the work technology is making cheaper.
The more durable value is in the decisions surrounding the artifact.
What should people learn? What should they practice? What should the environment support? What can they look up? What does not belong at all?
That is why I would not start with the 74 slides.
I would start with the work.
Your SME gave you 74 slides. Your job is not to turn them into 74 better-looking screens.
An experiment I am considering
Would a complete content-triage workflow help?
I am exploring a practical workflow for taking a deck, document, or pile of SME notes and turning it into a defensible learning plan using these five buckets. If that would save you time on a real project, tell me. I would rather build it because practitioners need it than because I had another product idea.
No preorder. No fake scarcity. This is a real interest list for a self-serve Learning Rewired Lab™ Kit.
- Inventory messy SME source material
- Separate knowledge from performance
- Sort content into the five buckets
- Identify practice and performance support
- Produce a stakeholder-ready learning plan