eLearning? Forget Storyboards…

… well, not completely.

Nowadays we have such powerful authoring tools (Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, Lectora, to name a few) that it doesn’t justify to spend time creating a “wireframe-like” storyboard, showing it to the client, then recreating it all in a tool. Some of the advantages of developing straight into the tool, bypassing the storyboard:

1. Time savings: you’re not developing a detailed visual storyboard and then recreating things in a tool.
2. The client sees a working version from the beginning and has realistic expectations of the final product.
3. The client and you have a real model from which to improve, to frame the conversations.
4. You can adapt to the nature of the content more quickly. The content constantly changes anyway, developing straight into the tool will, often, open up different possibilities for visuals and interactions you might not have predicted in a static storyboard.

I’m not saying let’s not plan our content ahead of time. I’m simply saying let’s skip the super detailed storyboards we have been conditioned to do by the industry. I still use a textual storyboard with (normally) 5 columns: screen #, title, on-screen content, narration, media description (a verbal description of the ideal interaction – which can double as a description for accessibility purposes, feedback (where SME can provide notes).

This recent article by b Online Learning “To Storyboard or not to Storyboard” has some other excellent points on the value of jumping right into development from the source content.

Visit the Storyboard Depot by the eLearning Coach for several templates of visual and, more importantly, textual storyboards to download free of charge.