If you’re new to e-learning, you may have heard people throw around terms like storyboard and prototype without daring to ask the question: What’s the difference? Well, don’t worry, we’ve got...
Published 10 years ago
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Blog Post
Very interesting discussion we have here. Well, throughout my 18 years of developing e-learning content, I should say that 90% of the time, we would go through the Storyboarding process. Why?
1. Like Nicole said, "the storyboard is essentially the blueprint for the course being developed. The storyboard lays out the visuals, multimedia, text, audio elements, interactivities, and navigation details of each and every slide in your course.
Throughout my experience, even though with the Storyboarding process in place, there will tend to be changes, and changes made by Subject Matter Experts every now and then. So, the Storyboards help us in the "versioning" process and to keep track of the "performance of the Subject Matter Experts" (SME)s. In my e-learning exposure, we dealt with tremendous amount of content; namely for training and academic purposes (colleges and universities' type of content). If we don't start off with the Storyboards, the SMEs, being academicians, they would like to see the "blue prints". They want to ensure that their content is developed/designed as they had taught or visualized them. On our part as the developer, designing and developing e-learning content is all about "time", "money", and "performance". If SMEs had to make us change the Storyboards more than 3 times, it reflects their credibility in their understanding of their own content!
So, showcasing the visuals, multimedia, text, audio elements, interactivities, and navigation details of each and every slide in our course help us to:
a. get things right from the very start
b. help SMEs to visualize the content as they had "envisioned" them to be presented to the learners.
2. Storyboarding process also helps us to focus on important information and creativity from the very start. Like wanting to build a house, we have anticipated the "blue print" of the house from the beginning:
a. What kind of "house" are we building? = What kind of content are we developing?
(a small house, large house, a Tudor house, a single story house = a PDF content, a scenario-based content, gamification content, case-studies, etc.)
b. What kind of "rooms" are we creating? = What multimedia elements are we incorporating in the content?
(a bed room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, etc = texts, graphics, animations, videos, VOs, hyperlinks, etc.)
c. What decorative items can be added to the house (colors, shapes, sizes, etc = What interactive elements can be added to multimedia ones: games, quizzes, and activities such as drag and drop, click on, etc)
Having said
Having said that, what kind of Storyboards should be designed in the Storyboards?
1. They are usually just black/white/grey with important texts (that had been chunked during the Analysis stage), graphics that can be represented easily by Shutter Stock or any image bank and instructions to the programmers (navigations, animations, etc). If no images can be presented in this round, IDs will just describe in words the kind of graphics required.
At this first round, what is important is simply to present the "ideas", "content flow", and "content structure".
It is only during the first review, we would usually seek the SMEs opinion/advise in incorporating other elements that would add the "rooms to the house" and the "decorative elements" to be added to it. And we usually get a lot of input/feedback from SMEs from here on.
Having said all above, I; however, do agree that IDs need to be adaptive, flexible and agile in the content development process. If the content is not robust as the ones we usually develop for the academicians, we would usually zoom in straight into the Storyline instead. We normally do this if the content is "lesser than 10 pages of development (10 pages of A4 size content). Our experience IDs have also been trained to "chunk the content' in Storyline itself.
So, in other words, for us, to do Storyboards or not to do depends on:
1. the size of the content
2. the complexity of the content
3. the completeness of the content
4. the experience of the IDs in doing Storyboards (we usually allow only IDs with more than 8 years to skip the Storyboarding that has less 10 pages of content development)
Well, this planning seems to be working well for us!
I hope this contribution does provide some solutions to the Storyboarding process.
1. Like Nicole said, "the storyboard is essentially the blueprint for the course being developed. The storyboard lays out the visuals, multimedia, text, audio elements, interactivities, and navigation details of each and every slide in your course.
Throughout my experience, even though with the Storyboarding process in place, there will tend to be changes, and changes made by Subject Matter Experts every now and then. So, the Storyboards help us in the "versioning" process and to keep track of the "performance of the Subject Matter Experts" (SME)s. In my e-learning exposure, we dealt with tremendous amount of content; namely for training and academic purposes (colleges and universities' type of content). If we don't start off with the Storyboards, the SMEs, being academicians, they would like to see the "blue prints". They want to ensure that their content is developed/designed as they had taught or visualized them. On our part as the developer, designing and developing e-learning content is all about "time", "money", and "performance". If SMEs had to make us change the Storyboards more than 3 times, it reflects their credibility in their understanding of their own content!
So, showcasing the visuals, multimedia, text, audio elements, interactivities, and navigation details of each and every slide in our course help us to:
a. get things right from the very start
b. help SMEs to visualize the content as they had "envisioned" them to be presented to the learners.
2. Storyboarding process also helps us to focus on important information and creativity from the very start. Like wanting to build a house, we have anticipated the "blue print" of the house from the beginning:
a. What kind of "house" are we building? = What kind of content are we developing?
(a small house, large house, a Tudor house, a single story house = a PDF content, a scenario-based content, gamification content, case-studies, etc.)
b. What kind of "rooms" are we creating? = What multimedia elements are we incorporating in the content?
(a bed room, a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, etc = texts, graphics, animations, videos, VOs, hyperlinks, etc.)
c. What decorative items can be added to the house (colors, shapes, sizes, etc = What interactive elements can be added to multimedia ones: games, quizzes, and activities such as drag and drop, click on, etc)
Having said
Having said that, what kind of Storyboards should be designed in the Storyboards?
1. They are usually just black/white/grey with important texts (that had been chunked during the Analysis stage), graphics that can be represented easily by Shutter Stock or any image bank and instructions to the programmers (navigations, animations, etc). If no images can be presented in this round, IDs will just describe in words the kind of graphics required.
At this first round, what is important is simply to present the "ideas", "content flow", and "content structure".
It is only during the first review, we would usually seek the SMEs opinion/advise in incorporating other elements that would add the "rooms to the house" and the "decorative elements" to be added to it. And we usually get a lot of input/feedback from SMEs from here on.
Having said all above, I; however, do agree that IDs need to be adaptive, flexible and agile in the content development process. If the content is not robust as the ones we usually develop for the academicians, we would usually zoom in straight into the Storyline instead. We normally do this if the content is "lesser than 10 pages of development (10 pages of A4 size content). Our experience IDs have also been trained to "chunk the content' in Storyline itself.
So, in other words, for us, to do Storyboards or not to do depends on:
1. the size of the content
2. the complexity of the content
3. the completeness of the content
4. the experience of the IDs in doing Storyboards (we usually allow only IDs with more than 8 years to skip the Storyboarding that has less 10 pages of content development)
Well, this planning seems to be working well for us!
I hope this contribution does provide some solutions to the Storyboarding process.
Hi Fatimah! Thanks for sharing that great comment and for sharing your own opinion and experience. It's so helpful to get insights into how others are getting through the process. I really like your point about how the storyboard depends on many factors... I think that's a good point because in so many projects that's the case, you can't always say yes storyboarding or prototyping is necessary.. it always depends on the project!