Anyone who’s spent time in E-Learning Heroes has probably heard the term “storyboarding” for projects. But what exactly does it mean? Storyboarding is a critical planning step for an e-learning project, during which you are essentially creating a blueprint before you start to develop your project. Just as a builder wouldn’t begin construction of a house without a plan, the same goes for creating e-learning: for a successful project, you’ll need to start with an e-learning storyboard.
Planning Your Storyboard
To help you define the scale and scope of information for your project storyboard, use the following planning steps. Chances are you casually thought about these as you prepped your project, but it’s critical to document the information so you can get a big picture of all the stakeholders, objectives, and resources for your project. To plan your storyboard, you’ll want to:
Define the project team
Identify all stakeholders and participants on the project, and clearly communicate their roles for the group. This information is critical to determining how much detail your storyboard will need. For example, if the person creating the storyboard is not the same as the person developing the content, then you’ll need to be sure the document includes all the info the developer will need to build the course.
Do a feasibility check
Make sure you understand what the tools are and what the team is capable of before you storyboard, to ensure everything you include is actually feasible and appropriate for the project.
Do your instructional design homework
Know what learning activities you want to include in your course, and how you plan to sequence them. You’ll want to determine in advance if your client has particular exercises in mind, so you can incorporate them into your course design.
Committing the time and effort for these planning steps is well worth it in the long run to help you avoid costly rework. With these three steps complete, you’re ready to start constructing your actual storyboard document.
Building Your Storyboard
Now you get to assemble all your information into a tangible (or virtual) document—and if you’re a creative geek like me, that’s really satisfying. To build your storyboard, you should:
Use a template you like
Don’t reinvent the wheel. If you have a template you like and you’re comfortable with, then use it. If you don’t, then browse these downloads and use or modify one to your liking. You can also post a thread here in the E-Learning Heroes forums asking for storyboard templates, and chances are the helpful folks in the Articulate community will put up samples in no time.
Use a Goldilocks approach to detail
Strike the right balance to give your team and stakeholders enough information about the navigation and links, media, text, interactions, on-screen elements, and programming notes without overwhelming or losing them in too much detail. The level of detail will depend on who, ultimately, is building your course from the storyboard. If it’s you, then you probably need less information than if you were handing the storyboard off to a developer who is newer to the project.
Consider including a visual map
If your course has complex branching or dynamic content, you may want to create a visual map so your team understands where learners land with every decision point. Being able to see the navigation flow is sometimes easier than trying to follow line numbers and references on a spreadsheet. To create your visual map, you can use a program like PowerPoint, or simply print the “Story View” in Storyline.
Use reference labels in your storyboard
Give each slide a reference label, whether it’s numeric, letters, or alphanumeric. Maybe your first slide is labeled A001, then the next is A002, then A003, and so on. Then, when you build the prototype of your course, you can include these reference labels, making it easy to map the slides in the storyboard with the actual slides in your course.
Remember, you’re not creating your actual course, so don’t write a book. This is simply a detailed outline that will set the framework for and scope of your course.
Using Your Storyboard
The great thing about a storyboard is that it’s not just a passive reference document. It’s a tool you can use to align your team around the directional details of your project. Before you start to develop your course, you should use your storyboard to:
Act as a review checkpoint
Circulate it to the team (as defined above) for review and approval. Doing so will build consensus on the project direction and approach, and can help flesh out scope and design issues before you’re deep into building, when it’s harder (and costlier!) to change direction.
Tip: Use change tracking tools: ask reviewers to switch on “change tracking” so you can easily see their revisions.
Consolidate client feedback
Ask clients to collect and consolidate their feedback onto your storyboard document so you don’t end up with multiple, slightly different versions of the same document. Using an online document tool like Google docs can alleviate some version-control issues. But it’s also good practice, from an efficiency standpoint, to collect feedback in one fell swoop, by a certain date, rather than piecemeal, in a protracted and loosely defined review process.
Find opportunities for efficient development
You don’t need to follow the linear path of your storyboard when you prepare to develop your course. Instead, you can identify non-overlapping course sections and plan to develop them in parallel. This might mean a team member works on a later, discrete section before switching to collaborate on an earlier or sequential section. You’ll need to manage what work gets done when, but oftentimes you can find opportunities for completing more than one section at a time.
When you finish your e-learning storyboarding exercise, you and your team will have a comprehensive view of how your course will look, feel, and function. Your storyboard may even save you time in the long run, since you’ll have the content and structure clearly mapped out and ready at your fingertips. So let your storyboard do some heavy lifting up front, so your course is easier, faster, and more fun to build later.