Storyboarding the eLearning Project

When it comes to eLearning, the worst thing you can do is make it up as you go along. A lot of planning should go into the project, and the most important and time-consuming step in the process is the creation of the storyboard.

The storyboard includes the text, media (sound, images, and video), and interactive elements that support the project's learning outcomes and objectives. As well, the storyboard serves to keep you focused on both the audience and design consistency.

There are as many approaches to storyboard creation as there are developers. The approaches range from a pencil and a sheet of paper to, in the case of extremely complex or technical projects, commercial software designed for this purpose.

If you are like most developers, the odds are you already have software that can be used for building a storyboard on your computer. For example, Macromedia Freehand MX and Fireworks MX 2004, which are bundled with the MX 2004 Studio, are great tools. Storyboards created in these applications can be printed as well as output in a Web format and posted to a staging site for client review. Page-layout applications such as Adobe InDesign CS, Illustrator CS, and Photoshop CS can also be used, as can the common applications Microsoft PowerPoint and even Microsoft Word.

At this stage of the process, you don't need a Fine Arts degree. What you are developing is a plan that communicates what happens on the screen and where it happens on the screen. You should also create a content inventory that lists all of the media elements. This will give you a good overview of what you need to acquire and/or create.

What you need at this stage is consistency of design by repeating what interactions are required and the page types used. The key to learning is consistency and predictability. If you use a particular caption style to indicate a question, then that style is to be rigorously used throughout the entire movie. After the student becomes familiar with the style, consistency and predictability become intuitive as the learner recognizes the functions of the various onscreen elements in the movie.

Use the storyboard to identify logical groupings of the content. For example, there may be a blank slide used to separate the sections of the movie, a series of captions that present the information during the movie's playback, a series of slides that engage the learner through rollovers, and so on; and, at the end of each section, there is a multiple-choice quiz. Each of these "sections" should be presented to the learner in a similar manner. For example, the blank slide used to introduce each section uses the same design throughout the movie. The best way of doing this is to use a template for the content. Not only does a template inject consistency into the look and feel of the groupings, but it can also contain the style guide you develop (see the following Tip) and speed up the process.

Finally, test the design. This is simply showing the storyboard to people and asking them to use it. Listen carefully to their feedback; they can help isolate design flaws, which are best (and easily) addressed at this stage of the process. Discovering and addressing these flaws in the midst of the development process is, at the very least, an expensive proposition.

Tips

• Here's an interesting approach to storyboarding from Captivate Product Manager Silke Fleisher: Use Captivate to create the storyboard by doing an initial capture of the procedure or movie, and then output the capture as a Word document. From there, you can add notes to the storyboard and make subsequent changes. "It is an extremely rapid and effective approach."

• It isn't difficult to apply a style guide to your movie. One way to do this is by inserting a couple of blank slides into the movie. You can then add a series of captions and error/success messages with specific fonts, color, and sizes to those slides, which are then applied to the entire movie.Simply copy and paste them into the slides where they are needed. When you are ready to export the movie, simply delete the blank slides with the caption styles.