Dana Goldstein Ladywonk.
Elearning Storyboarding 101
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 by David Becker
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This guest blog post is by David Becker, an Articulate user and owner of Becker Consulting, based in Melbourne, Australia. He’s been designing and developing e-learning and blended learning for nearly 15 years.
Suppose you’ve hired me to build a house for you. We sit down, have a chat about what you want built, and then I explain that my approach is to just start building, making it up as I go along, and we’ll just see how things come out. This is, of course, absurd, and yet some e-learning developers do that very thing. But, like the blueprint for a house, e-learning development should derive from a carefully crafted plan. This plan is called a storyboard.
A storyboard is like a script with actors, dialog, and directions. The dialogue can be either on-screen, spoken, or both. And the actors are not people, but rather on-screen elements like text boxes, images, videos, and things the learner clicks.
The value of storyboarding
The storyboard’s primary value is that it forces you to have a reason for, and a consistent approach to, everything you do. The storyboard is your plan for sequencing the content, applying a consistent style, designing meaningful activities, providing feedback or instructions to the learner, and so on.
When I develop a course, I typically have my client sign off on the storyboard before I begin my development tasks. This way, the storyboard allows clients, subject matter experts, developers, and other stakeholders a chance to have a say in content development. And storyboards often help reveal issues over scope, wording, technical limitations, and so on before more expensive development is underway. By the time the storyboard is signed off, I have a clear document, agreed to by everyone and detailing exactly what needs to be done.
TIP: When submitting your storyboard for review, ask reviewers to use Microsoft Word’s track changes feature to make it easy to see their feedback. If there are multiple re