This week I was asked to provide my insight on my instructional design practical experience with: storyboards, scripts, and templates.
While my personal experience for all three of these are all in the military, I do have a lot of experience as an instructor using all three of these practices in my content design. Let me walk you through some of these and how I utilize them in my current field. I’ll also try and relate to things that I have learned in my eLearning Content Design course at Boise State to explain things that I am going to try to incorporate in the future.
Storyboarding was something that I had never actually codified prior to taking my eLearning and Content Design course at Boise State. However, even without having it codified as storyboarding I definitely have a deliberate process for planning out my content and how I present information to a student.
Preferred Medium: My preferred medium to do this is actually fairly old-school. I use a white board or a notebook to "map out” the experience that I want to give to a student. This usually manifests as a mind map of random ideas centered around the theme of instruction to be taught. Once I have all of those down on the whiteboard, I begin to categorize content that I would like to present in order to make sure I have covered every area I believe is necessary to teach the assigned topic.
You’re probably thinking that this seems a bit backwards because I haven’t talked about objectives yet… well that is actually what I accomplish next. For my objectives I usually do that after I receive the time allotment for my given instruction block. For example, if I am told that I have 90 minutes for instruction then I can determine what objectives I can actually meet in that time slot. Most people ask me why I do this and how I can storyboard and plan without knowing the time. My answer is simple, I don’t want to detract from my thought process on what should be instructed on the topic I am given. Most of the time I am designing the content I am teaching as the SME on the subject as well. So, I want to put down on paper what the “best” content is to get the topic across to the student. If I restrict myself by time right at the beginning of my thought process, I feel like I overly restrict the desired content too much in the beginning.
Once I get my objectives lined out based on what I see as the categories of content on the whiteboard or in my notebook, I simply start organizing the content into what I define as my “standard structure”.
1. Introduce Myself – title slide and information on who I am
2. Introduce the Content – give the why you are here
3. Introduce the “so what” – give the why you should care
4. Present the content – go through my design
5. Re-introduce the “so what” – make sure the value is there
6. Wrap it all up – cover what we covered
7. Re-introduce myself – give contact info and open for questions
Okay, so that is my storyboarding process but as you can tell it is formatted around me briefing content to a student instead of a student interacting with the content in an eLearning setting.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had a lot of experience designing eLearning until I began taking this class. What I have learned in this course so far though, is that my eLearning storyboarding doesn’t differ much from my classroom lecture storyboarding. The difference that I have found is that I use the white board a lot more before going to a computer. With branched scenarios I found this methodology super important. I needed to follow my 3C’s methodology (Snegirev, 2016) Every time I would throw a challenge out there, I would then need to map out the choices in detail and the consequences of those choices.
My process for storyboarding actually helps me a ton with the branched scenarios. My weakness in this area right now is actually my limited experience and knowledge with learning management systems. Here are two examples of my eLearning design just using MS PowerPoint.
As you can see, these are very clunky, and it is my first experience actually designing eLearning content where I am not actually presenting and navigating through the slides.
Scripting is something that I definitely did not do prior to this class consciously. I always had an idea of what I wanted to talk about for each slide in a presentation. However, what I never considered was an actual script for eLearning content. So, why does a script matter? Well, there are actually 508 ADA compliance standards for eLearning content. Simple things like, keyboard shortcuts that allow larger keys to be used for navigation, narration and closed captioning to allow for deaf users to read and blind users to hear, narrations for different content on the site like pictures and graphics, and the ability to make sure you can size the content correctly for users are just a few of the things to consider. Here is a quick site to see some general tips and tricks: 508 Compliant eLearning: Tips And Tricks - eLearning Industry
Templates are something that I have both used and designed for some of my content in the military. I have mainly done all of this in PowerPoint but we also have lesson plans built in MS Word as well. Here are some examples of Standard Slide Decks that we use as templates or that I have used in the past.
These actually allow myself and my fellow instructors to quickly put their content into an “approved” format that also helps guide them through their own content design as well.
In addition to standardized slide decks, we also have lesson plan templates (can’t find an example of one that I have approval to publish right now) that “answers the mail” for our higher headquarters requirements.
REFERENCES
Snegirev, S. (2016, December 16). The 3 Cs of Branching Scenarios. Retrieved July 1, 2022, from eLearning Industry: https://elearningindustry.com/3-cs-of-branching-scenarios#:~:text=Summary%3A%20Challenge%2C%20Choices%2C%20Consequences.
Thanks for the interesting article. Our company is constantly improving the software to facilitate the work of the personnel department.