What is a Storyboard?
Should you begin a Learning Object with an eLearning storyboard? A storyboard is a visual representation of how your eLearning module will unfold.
Some designers prefer to jump into rapid prototyping, while others prefer to visualize the entire course from start to finish before starting. I’ve tried it either way, and I like to begin with a storyboard.
Why You Need a Storyboard
Storyboards allow you to conceptualize and organize your ideas before you build a course. Storyboarding is crucial to scenario-based eLearning. It allows you to map out and refine your ideas visually before you develop the course. It is much easier to make revisions to a storyboard than a finished course.
Creating a storyboard allows you to iron out important details that help you better envision your course. You can make it as detailed or as graphic as you need to communicate your ideas to collaborators, SMEs, and stakeholders. Presenting a storyboard makes it easier for Instructional designers to get feedback and buy-in from stakeholders early in the design process.
You don’t want to spend time, effort, and money creating a course only to find out you did it wrong or left essential details out. If this happens, you might have to rebuild the course. Storyboards can save time, effort, and money by giving you a preview of how a course will play out when you finish.
What do I Need to Create a Storyboard?
You can create a storyboard with pen and paper. If you want, you could do it in a word document. What matters is that you and the people who view it understand it. Undoubtedly, it is easier to use software designed for storyboarding.
As a creative, I like looking for tools within my budget to practice and support my eLearning development process, and I found this tool Twine at https://twinery.org/.
It’s free and easy to use. I started designing with it immediately:
A description on their webpage reads: Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is entirely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.
You can download Twine to Mac or windows or use it online.
Benefits to Twine for Storyboarding
I like this tool because I can use it without getting distracted by visuals. Also, SMEs can focus on the content, which is all that’s needed to design a storyboard. Furthermore, instead of going from planning to rapid prototyping with lots of iterations, I can use this tool to storyboard after the planning phase. Even so, you might have several iterations after storyboarding, but they reduce the need for complete do-overs.
Another reason I like Twine is that it is a collaborative tool To collaborate, archive the file and save the generated HTML file to dropbox or google drive. Collaborators can’t use the file simultaneously, though.
Using Twine is easy. You can create links that connect one slide to another. It is an intuitive program you don’t need any prior knowledge to begin using it. Nonetheless, if you do get stuck, there are how-to tutorials available.
Personally, I plan to use Twine to practice building templates and creating content for my portfolio. It has gotten me excited about storyboarding. If you give Twine a go, let me know how it goes.
Follow the link to read how I use storyboard templates for eLearning design.
https://tiptoplearner.com/using-templates-for-storyboarding/