Before you dive into eLearning development, do you take the time to visualize your entire course from start to finish in a storyboard? Dr. Dave Christiansen, a senior instructional designer on our custom development team, joined us for a webinar to share why storyboarding before development is such a great idea.
Let’s Talk About Storyboarding
Why storyboard?
Storyboarding first saves time, resources, and money. By outlining your general content, concepts, and ideas you create a reference to give the client for approval before you dedicate time and resources to building a functioning course. This storyboard will also reveal gaps in information that you need to go over with the client and get more specifics on.
First, you need to catch the vision
The first step in the ADDIE model is ANALYZE. This is when you explore how things how and the way they should be—that difference is the performance gap. Your training needs to fill that performance gap.
As you’re creating your storyboard, ask questions and take notes on that performance gap:
- “Why is this training needed?”
- “What behaviors do you want to change or influence?”
- Who is the target audience?
Your final storyboard should provide an additional way to ensure you don't forget any key learning objectives or requests from your client, subject matter expert, or stakeholder.
Then, you need to share your vision
A storyboard can help you organize the flow of your course and communicate your ideas to stakeholders. At eLearning Brothers, we often provide our clients with up to 10 different look and feel storyboards. By asking what they like and dislike about each, we can determine the ideal look and feel for a project.
In addition to the look and feel, this is when you talk about the approach for the learning content. For example, you might be thinking of creating a character guide who takes the learner through the training, or you might be considering a more immersive, game-based approach. Using a storyboard to convey that approach will save you a lot of time if changes need to be made.
Simplify, simplify, simplify
It’s our job to take complicated information and simplify it so learners can understand it.
Dave shared an example of a course we created where we simplified a lot of complication information in a unique way.
Watch the recording below to see the example!
Hopefully this information helps you start your next project off on the right foot!
We have a couple more resources around storyboarding and project kickoff.
Before we even begin to storyboard, we gather information through a readiness call. Learn more about that call and get a free download of all the questions we ask on the Readiness call in this post:
7 Tasks Rockstars Check Off Before Kickoff: Step 1
We also have a downloadable blueprinting template you can use to gather information for your storyboard if that's more your style. Get it here:
Blueprinting Template for eLearning Developers
Lastly, if you want our team of expert instructional designers and developers to help you with your eLearning develop, contact our Custom Solutions team.
