Imagine any creative process that requires you to put pen to paper. If you’re trying to tell a story through images, you’ll first want to map out the different stages in your story. In learning and development, just like movie production, book publishing, and other creative fields, this process is called storyboarding.
The storyboard is the blueprint for an eLearning course. It visually communicates the course objectives and brings the course script to life. Storyboards provide a smooth transition to the actual building and development of a course.
Our creative designers consult with clients regularly to help them develop best practices for storyboarding. Here are a few of our designers’ storyboarding tips:
1. Share your vision
Storyboards are one of the best tools you can use to share your vision for a course or project. You can work with your team to map out how a course will take learners through a subject. Your storyboard should include everything that will be included in each component of the course. We recommend using text, imagery, audio and other visuals to ensure you take into consideration all learning styles.
2. Choose a theme
As with any story, a theme is important to keep learners engaged and make the content memorable. If you’re trying to highlight a sales technique through eLearning, one approach may be to create a character and tell a story throughout the course. Use your storyboard to show how the character encounters an objection and how he or she uses the sales technique to overcome that objection and make the sale.
3. Determine the multimedia elements
One of the most important elements of storyboarding, according to our creative designers, is identifying (and, in some cases, creating) quality graphics and visuals. How do you make sure your images look good, have learning value, and work with the course design? Decide upon all the multimedia elements you will use in your course by including a description of each in your storyboard. Be sure to make space on each screen for your visual elements.
4. Plan course navigation
Within your storyboard, you should identify where to put the navigation buttons and what graphics you will use to represent these buttons. You should also note how the course will respond to the learners’ actions or behaviors. For example, will you use branched learning to send the learner to a new topic, depending on where he or she clicks? Will you use closed navigation to keep a learner on a screen until he or she answers a knowledge check?
5. Put it all together
The storyboard should be the culmination of an engaging script and attractive slides and graphics. Your final storyboard should demonstrate consistency in both the tone and the look. It should be labeled clearly and should be easy to read. The storyboard should also provide an easy-to-follow road map for the final course delivery.
If you’d like more information on how you can effectively develop a storyboard, call us today. We’ll introduce you to our creative designers and consult with you about the goals of your program.
