Hello, my friends. So storyboards and eLearning
are kind of like blueprints for a house. When you have a really good storyboard, it
serves as the basis for the rest of your project. It makes it so much easier to get approval on
the project itself. And it just streamlines the development process. So in this video,
we're going to take a look at how we can create a really strong storyboard. We'll look
into some examples, some different approaches we can use and a whole lot more. So stay
tuned and we'll dive into it in a few seconds. All right. So the storyboard is definitely an
integral part of the instructional design process. It's kind of the culmination of all
of your instructional design work. It's where you lay out the structure
of the learning experience, all of the texts that will go into
it, all of the programming notes, and a whole lot more, but ideally you'd be
able to show this storyboard to a client. They'd be able to look through it and get
a pretty good picture of exactly how the final project will look. And then you would
ideally be able to hand it off to a developer and they would be able to develop it
out and bring the whole thing to life. So we'll talk about a few of the nuances
there. We're going to really dive deep into it. But first let's take a look at what you should
do before diving into the storyboard, because you really shouldn't just like open up a word
document and start storyboarding. There is some upfront work that we want to make sure we have
done here. So we're going to talk about the, kind of the source material that you
should use when creating a storyboard. So one of the first options is an action
map. So we would use this if we were using Cathy Moore's action mapping process. If
you've been here on the channel for a long, you know, we're big fans of that, and
I have a whole action mapping playlist, if you do want to learn more about that, but
essentially the action map includes all of the necessary actions that we need our audience to
perform in order to achieve the business goal. So, we want to make sure that our
storyboard is addressing those actions that we want people to practice. So again
check out the action mapping content, I'll link it in the description. If you haven't
seen it already. The other more traditional option here would be learning objectives. So if you
did an instructional design masters program, you know, we should know by now, writing the
objectives are very important because they actually do serve as the blueprint for everything
that follows, right? We want to make sure that all of our content, all of our practice
activities, all of our assessment questions are directly addressing those learning objectives.
And I do have a video about this. It's about how to use Bloom's taxonomy to create these
really strong, measurable learning objectives. So go ahead and check out that video just
to make sure your skills with this are sharp because if our objectives aren't really
good, our storyboard is going to suffer, right? We want to make sure
that our whole storyboard is addressing these learning objectives or these
actions we've prioritized from the action map. So again, all of these resources, I will link
in the description below, but we want to make sure that we have these things down before
moving on and actually creating a storyboard. And then finally we will, if we've
had the chance or opportunity to conduct some analysis and speak to
our audience and, you know, determine, do the performance context analysis that the
training context analysis, all of that, we want to have a really good idea of where our audience
is coming from, what they're trying to achieve, which challenges are in their way. And when we
conduct analysis, we would uncover all of that information. So when we go into this storyboard,
we want to try to reflect some of these things we've learned about our audience in the storyboard
itself. And let me know if we want it to do a full video about that, about how to
use the analysis data and kind of weave that into the solution. But I do
have a video that you may or may not have seen. It's about the five different types of
analysis you can use for instructional design. So check out that video too, if this
seems new to you, or if you're not as familiar with instructional design. So
all of these will be linked below. Maybe you want to pause this video and check
some of those out before moving forward, but let's dive into the
storyboarding specific content. So there some things we need to ask ourselves
or decide before actually doing any writing, right? So what is the purpose of our storyboard?
Are we using this to guide our own development? Because that's smart sometimes. It's
rarely a good idea to just dive right into Storyline and start building. Maybe if
you're used to doing that, to learn the tool, or if it's just a personal project and
you don't really have any stakeholders. But a storyboard can really help, right? It
lets you just focus on the content itself and the activities you're including. Yeah.
You basically just get to plan it out before actually developing anything because if
you start developing things and then you're like, oh, maybe that's not the best idea.
Maybe I should switch out this content. It gets a lot more time consuming
to change things at that point. Now the other option here is maybe it's to guide
a developer through the development. So you can, you probably can imagine if you're creating
a storyboard to guide your own development, this project that you've envisioned from the
beginning and that, yeah, you have a very clear idea of how things will look and function.
That storyboard is probably going to be a lot less detailed than if you had to just hand this
storyboard off to a developer who knows nothing about it previously. And hasn't been involved in
it from the beginning. So. Again, that's why the purpose matters here. If it's for yourself, if
you can probably get away with it being a lot less detailed. But if it's for a developer who
maybe knows very, very little about instructional design, we're going to need to add a lot more
detail and guidance to the storyboard itself. Now, approval. That's the other. So these first
two bullet points, like that's one of the main purposes of a storyboard, I guess, is to guide
development. So it's really like, is it guiding my development or someone else's. The other main
purpose of a storyboard is to seek approval from your client, your stakeholders, whoever you
need approval from before moving forward. Now, well, maybe you're getting that
approval in a very like warm environment, like a meeting where people are there live
and everyone who needs to approve it can get together and you can kind of guide
them through the storyboard in real time. If you're doing that, the actual details on
the storyboard itself can be a little bit more limited than if you need to get cold
approval, for example. So in this case, maybe you're just sending out the storyboard to
like 10 different people who need to approve it. And I hope you're not in a position where
you need approval from 10 different people, but if you are, probably not going to get all
of those people live on a meeting together. You're probably just delivering it cold. So
in that case, you are going to want to include more details, maybe more programming
notes, so that if someone does really, really want to get a strong idea of what's
going on on a given slide, for example, that they'll be able to do so using just the
text and details you have on the storyboard. So keep these things in mind who is developing it, who is approving it because those things
may impact how detailed your storyboard is. All right. So now let's get onto some of
the jucier stuff. What is actually included on a storyboard? So this is not, maybe
this could be an exhaustive list, right? But I'm sure there are other things
that could be added to storyboards and not all storyboards have all of
these elements. So the first thing, we probably have a section for the onscreen
text, right? What texts is going to be on this given screen for this given slide?
Because a lot of eLearning is slide base. If you're developing a video, maybe you won't
have a section like this on your storyboard. Voiceover. So maybe we have the
actual text itself, like what will be spoken on this slide or on this
section of the learning experience, maybe we include the file names because
we already have the voiceover files. We just need to develop, to tell the developer,
which file to drop into this given slide. Or maybe we have both of those things. So we have
all of the texts that's going to be included, and we have either what the voiceover file will be named or what the voice over file we
have currently is named. All right. Images, too. So what kind of graphics or images
are we including on this screen? Maybe we include a description of the images like office scene
with seating and people sitting there. Right. Or maybe we have the image itself. Maybe
we found this image on a site, like Adobe Stock or something. And we have like the URL
to the image, or even just the file name. Because again, sometimes when you
hand off a storyboard to a developer, it might also include every single file that
they need. There'll be a folder. And within that folder, there'll be a sub folders like with
the voiceover and the images and the sound effects and everything else. And the developer is going
through here and just looking at file names. So they know exactly where to put things.
Storyboards like that and getting all of the files. Like those projects are a dream to work
on as a freelancer or, and I'm sure there are full-time employees who just spend all day
in Storyline putting these things together. So that's where the file names come into
play. Like if someone else is developing it and they're going to have all of
these files delivered to them, just be as clear as possible. So they
don't need to really do any guesswork. Programming notes. This is important too. How
do we want this slide to function? Maybe it's as simple as when the user selects this button, jump
to slide 1.5. Or it could be more complex where after a second attempt, show screen 1.2 and after
third failed attempt, show this failure screen and X, Y, and Z. And again, just any kind of notes
where it's like, we need to tell the program or how this will function so they can figure out all
of the variables and triggers and conditions. We just put it in plain English and the programmer
or the developer will figure it all out. Animation notes. Sometimes this is combined
with programming notes and it's just like everything the programmer needs to know will
go in one section or we could have a specific animation notes section. And this is where
we would maybe tell the developer where to animate in the different objects based
on the narration or the voiceover. So, for example, maybe after the first sentence
we're animating in one image and after the second sentence, we're animating in some specific
onscreen text, all of that can go in the animation notes, or if they're combined,
programming notes can include all of that. And then finally, of course,
the slide number in slide title. This just kind of gives everyone a solid basis
to refer back to whenever there are issues. So, the instructional designer that the
developer, you know, if we're like, okay, yeah, let's look at slide 1.3. It will
be the same thing in the authoring tool, as it would be in the storyboard. It's very
easy to catch errors and just communicate on a common ground when we have a really solid
naming structure like this for the slides. All right. So again, Maybe not an exhaustive
list. Let me know in the comments, if there's anything else that you've seen
on a storyboard or anything else that you would like to include. But I think this
covers just about everything I've seen on the storyboard I've created
or worked from as a developer. All right. So again, your storyboard might look
very different depending on the approach you're taking with the learning project. So we're going
to talk about a few different approaches here. One may be a traditional eLearning course.
So, this is where we have like a title screen. We present some objectives, we have some
content, we have some practice activities or questions interspersed throughout,
and most likely an assessment at the end. This is what most of the eLearning is like
out there. It's what I refer to as traditional eLearning. And it usually stems from traditional
learning objectives, like we talked about earlier. Now what I've been working on
lately, what I teach in my bootcamp, the projects I'm most excited about, like the
client work that I've I've done most recently is all this story-driven scenario based learning. So this is not traditional. We
work from an action map for this and the storyboard is a lot more lightweight
and less detailed because it's generally a series of multiple choice questions, with
a story that weaves them all together. So we'll look at some examples of this, but those
two storyboards will likely look very different. And then finally, maybe we're just designing, or
maybe we're just writing some scripts for some videos, either educational videos or explainer
videos. And we may not need any programming notes. Like maybe it's not interactive at all. We're
literally just creating videos in that case. Again, the storyboard will be much more simplified
because we don't need any programming notes, because there is no interactivity. It's play
the video or pause the video, essentially. So here we go. We're diving into some examples
here. So this is just a quick example. I spun up of a traditional storyboard and again,
they all may look a little different. There are different ways to include these elements so
you can lay it out however it works best for you. This is just one example. But you notice at the
top, we have the title and slide number. So slide 1.1 Introduction. So when I'm creating this in
a tool like Articulate Storyline, for example, I know as the developer, I'm just going
to name this 1.1 slide Introduction. Now the onscreen text. That's the text
that will be on the screen. Again, this is often abbreviated as OST. The voiceover,
it tells us which file to include here. And it shows us the actual transcripts for that
voiceover. So if I do need to create some subtitles or something, I can literally
just copy and paste from this storyboard into a subtitle generator or into the
transcript space in a tool like Storyline. Animation notes. Again, these are pretty
conversational. Fade in the onscreen text after the first sentence of voiceover and ignore
my little typo there in the animation notes. And then programming notes again, this is where we
actually say what interactivity we're going for. Go to slide 1.2, when the user
selects the "Begin Course" button. So, there we have it. Over here on the right, we have an image file that we're using and this kind
of little placeholder I have right here that may just be the image itself or more likely it will be
an actual visual of how that screen should look. So maybe it shows the image in the background.
It shows where the onscreen text will go. And it actually shows that "Begin Course" button.
So not all detail, not all storyboards have that level of detail. Obviously, if you're a developer,
it's so nice when the instructional designer does give you a storyboard that actually has all
of the visual pieces figured out or mostly figured out. And you can just kind of add some
final touches, but again, not always the case. Sometimes you just might not have that
right column where it has the image and it just all is text-based. And it's up to you as
a developer to figure out how things will look. Here's another example. So this is what
I'm calling an animation heavy storyboard. And again, you notice I took out some of the
elements. You could always put these back in, but the real focus I wanted to show you here is
this voiceover section in the middle. So notice the on-screen text is numbered. So one, two and
three we have, yeah. One is today you will learn. Two is how to make a sandwich and so on and
so forth. I noticed that the images section at the bottom. You could have called this assets.
You could have it all together where the texts and the images are interspersed and numbered in
like an assets column here in the storyboard. Again, there are options. These are just
examples, but look at the voiceover section. Are you ready to learn today? And then
notice in brackets? I have O S T one. That's where we, as the, as the programmer
would fade in that, that first on-screen text. So today. And then right, when that the narrator
is reading that, we would fade in that first piece of text, which is "today you will learn." So then
the narration continues today, you will learn how. And at this point we fade in the next piece
of on-screen text, how to make a sandwich. And right as the narrative is saying how
to make a sandwich and then image one fades in which is sandwich.jpg. So now we have an
image of a sandwich coming in, as well as how, and then the third onscreen text. So I hope you
get the idea. I don't mean to put you to sleep with like reading this verbatim. It's very like
intuitive here, but I've worked from storyboards like this, where it does have this, this level
of detail where the instructional designer uses little brackets or maybe little
like superscripts or subscript numbers. So that the developer knows exactly when to enter
each of these assets along with the voiceover. So just another, another thing, don't be surprised if
you see this and if you are handing off animation, heavy storyboards to a developer, just giving
them those prompts could help them a lot. So more detailed, but saves time in development and just keeps things more consistent with
your vision as the instructional designer. Because again, some developers know nothing about
instructional design and where we're directing the user's attention and all of that stuff. So
that, may fall on the instructional designer a lot of the time. All right. So this right
here, these are what my storyboards to look like these days. So again, like I said, I work on
these scenario based and story-driven projects. I use very, very lightweight storyboards like
this, and I usually have them just in a Google document for clients to sign off on. So again,
I use this kind of warm approach. So I let my clients know each of these prompts is going
to have a continue button. So for example, that first prompt you arrive at the office. The
air is cooled, the lights are off and there are no signs of movement that will be on the screen
of its own and there will be a continue button. So when we move on from that, we reach a
question slide. What would you like to do? And you notice we have three choices and we
have a consequence associated with each choice. Okay. So if you look at choice A,
if you look at past that first line break, uh, that first blank line you notice
in brackets, I have like a little quick and dirty programming note. Return to question
slide when user selects "Try Again" button. So when there are little programming notes
like that, I'll just add them in brackets. Again, this is really lightweight. It's a very quick approach to storyboarding. And I usually
work through this in close collaboration with my, with my clients, with my stakeholders. So they
know what's going on. They can picture the final project. I've shown them examples already. So
if I was just handing this off to a developer, I would need to add more details
around programming and all of that. And I have handed off storyboards like this
to developers, but I go back through and I add more instructions and I always give
them a prototype as well, so that they can see how this storyboard translates into an
actual developed interactive prototype, but check this out. This again, this is a very
agile approach to story boarding, but it's good. This is what I used to get approval for
all of the content before moving forward to development with my own clientswhere I do
the instructional design and the development. So this hasn't failed me yet. There, once
we get this approved, there are no changes to the content. I really liked this approach
to storyboarding for this type of project. But you can see, this is much more like
lightweight than something like this, where it's much more formal, much more
differentiated section by section. Whereas this is kind of just like one big flow.
What's happening when we select choice A? We'll read all of that right in the consequence.
And you notice I do some very light color coding as well. So we know which choice
is correct, which choice is incorrect. And here's one more example. This is
kind of a text-based storyboard for a video or for very animation heavy project. You know, maybe you're still developing it in
an authoring tool, but essentially it's just animated slides with, and you just press
the next button and go to the next one. So the notice that we have like
a file name. So you can think of that left column as like a slide number or a
file name or whatever, but it's really helpful because when you do have it named or numbered
like this, and you hand this script off to a voiceover artist, they can just name the files
with the exact numbering system you have here. So it can become much easier when
it comes time for development. So notice we have the narration in one column. So, this is what will be said, right? This is
the narration that we'll be playing and we're going to need visuals at all times to support
that narration. So that column on the right it's literally just a text based description of
what will be happening along with that narration. And again, I had some fun writing this just
now, if you pause the video and read this, or if you've been reading this, you can see,
I had a little too much fun. I don't know if this is like a horror movie storyboard or what.
Let's just look at the narration: "When you visit the office and notice that the air is cooler than
usual, there could be a problem. If the lights are off and you don't see anyone around, then there's
definitely a problem." So now, if we look at the visuals column, we start with a full screen image
of office with people there's a light blue overlay with low opacity snowflakes appearing. When
the narrator says the air is cooler than usual. So, you know, kind of just to give like
a frosty effect, like it's cool here. And then we fade in a dark overlay and fade
out the people with the second sentence. So, I don't even think I'm using full sentences
here. Clearly, I'm just like writing like, I just want to give someone an idea
where if, if a client is reading this, they get an idea of what's going to be going
on on the screen when that narration happens. So this is purely for like seeking approval on
this storyboard, seeking approval on the vision before going ahead and just building out a whole
video and then hoping that the client likes it. So there we go. This would just continue
so on and so forth for an entire video. And you can imagine how you can combine some
of these different storyboarding approaches. Maybe we have something like this for the
interactive slides, but then maybe we have scripts where we would develop out like a five
minute video or two minute video, and that would just be dropped into a slide in Storyline with
no interactivity over it. So you can combine these different approaches to create one big
storyboard document that you seek approval on. Hopefully this gave you some different ideas.
Again, if you have used different storyboard approaches or you have any feedback
or comments or questions about these, definitely drop a comment. I'll do
my best to answer. And I know we have a lot of really smart and experienced
designers who hang out on this channel. So, so. Well, let's see what I have for you
next. So the different tools that we can use to storyboard, let's chat a bit about that.
My favorite hands down is just using Google docs because it is so easy to collaborate.
It's free. The clients can leave comments and we can all edit it in real time
and see who is suggesting which edits. So just a great collaboration
tool. It's super lightweight, and I love having it in the browser. I
can access it from my phone if I need to. Very good, lightweight tool. Microsoft Word,
probably the most popular tool for storyboarding, just because, you know, Word is so popular and
you can create tables and stuff easily in there. PowerPoint is also a very popular.
So you can use the kind of table layouts that we've been talking about, but
I've also worked with storyboards where, how it looks in PowerPoint. It's exactly how
it will look in, in Storyline. And then we have like the programming notes and stuff, like off to
the side, kind of off the screen or in the notes. So I loved working from those because I can
just import the PowerPoint to Storyline. I kind of have the assets I need, and then
I can just kind of add the interactivity as needed to each of those slides. And then
of course you can just do the storyboarding in your eLearning authoring tool
of choice. It removes one step. You don't really have to do the
importing. You can kind of just work from Storyline. You see the instructions
on the slide. You can just kind of build it out, slide by slide. And once that storyboard gets
approved. But I use Google docs just to keep it really lightweight. Let us know if you've
done storyboarding in the past, which tool you prefer and why. I think that will help
give us some perspective here in the comments. And then finally, a way to really save
some time when you are storyboarding is to build out storyboarding templates.
So again, it saves you time, but it also serves as performance support for you.
And that you can use these templates to kind of guide your own development and
instead of having to start from scratch. So it doesn't just help you save
time on like a slide by slide level, right? Like we have these slide based
storyboards, so where we can see, okay, here's what's going on on slide one point. But you
can also build a template to help you on a larger like structural level. So again, if
you're designing a traditional course, Gagne's nine events serve as a really good
start to building a storyboard template. So, you know, Gagne's first event gain attention.
You would have a section in your storyboard for like gain attention and you can explain
here's how you're going to gain attention at the beginning of this lesson or this module
or whatever it is. When you need to go ahead and present the objectives, you have a section
on your storyboard. Here's how we're presenting objectives. Stimulating prior recall, again, you
would just have a section in this storyboard. Here is how we're going to stimulate prior recall.
So templates like this, it makes sure that you are hitting all of these necessary pieces for
really solid, cohesive learning experience. Check out the Gagne's nine events
video if you haven't already. And I do want to say, oh, and then I have another
section here, like questions with consequences. Like I have a template where I have like all
of this already set up. So then it's just very easy for me to kind of build it out with a client
because sometimes I, I build this while I'm on a call with a client, or I'll just take quick notes
through here while I'm on the call with the SME . And then I'll go ahead and write
it out further when I'm on my own. But yeah, so the templates can really help.
And I do want to extend an offer to you if you'd like to build a template together, like
maybe we do a live event here, like a webinar, and we'll build this template live together.
Talk about what we're doing as we do it. And hopefully build a, just like a really solid
storyboard template. And then we'll just give it away to everyone for free. I'll make it
so you can download it and use it on your. If you want to do that, let's try
to get this video to 250 likes and we will do that session. So
it seems like it will be fun. I have a feeling that it will be
useful for people just because, you know, people have asked about this
video for a while, but if you want to do it, drop the drop a like on the video. And
we will definitely make that happen. Now, if you're watching this because you want to become
an instructional designer, hopefully, you know, by now, but there is a full become an instructional
designer playlist. It's constantly growing, but, going through that playlist should definitely help
you get a leg up in the job market and stand out. A lot of people have found success going through
those videos and putting them all into practice. And then finally, again, if you just show your
support by dropping a comment, liking the video and subscribing to the channel, it really lets me
know that these videos here are helping you out. They do take some mental effort to make, but
I love actually doing the recording like this and, and getting them out there for you all
and hearing about how they're helping you out. So show some support if you've, if you've
made it here, you're already helping with the algorithm too, just by
watching the whole thing here. So I really appreciate you. There are a lot
more videos to come that will help you with your instructional design and eLearning
skills. And I will see you in the next one. Bye bye for now.
