How to storyboard a learning experience
Hi there,
Welcome to the latest edition of Learning Included! We hope this finds you safe and well.
We took a slightly different approach to this one and decided to talk more openly about how we tackle one of the most important stages in designing a course.
We’ve had a lot of fun putting this together and learnt a lot in the process.
We hope you enjoy!
An effective learning journey needs to have a clear destination and a clear origin. Without these, it’s more or less impossible to make decisions about the sequence of learning interactions, modes and experiences a learner needs to move through in order to reach their goals.
A powerful tool in a learning designers kit to help make sense of the learning journey is the storyboard. It involves getting all of the people who are involved in the development of the online course together to create a visual map of the flow of a course.
In this edition of Learning Included we want to shine a light on this critical part of the course design process.
Let’s get started …
How to storyboard a learning experience
Over the years we’ve been honing our own storyboarding process that we run at the start of an online course development project.
In this piece we walk through that process, the learning principles behind it and we share a Mural board template for you to use on your own projects.
Podcast: Storyboarding in action
With the topic of storyboarding at the top of our minds we fired up the mics and recorded a podcast episode with fellow LearnJammer, Lucy Williams.
In this ep Lucy goes into detail about how she used storyboarding extensively on an Erasmus+ project. The project aims to develop a training program to help teachers in mainstream secondary schools all over Europe to better recognise and support special educational needs in their classrooms, particularly with a focus on enabling inclusive teaching and learning.
We also share tips and ideas for how to storyboard remotely.
Storyboarding 2.0
Here’s a different take on storyboarding from digital product design agency AJ&Smart, explaining how they storyboard the user journey of a product. This way of working was the inspiration for our own course storyboarding approach, but it’s always good to go back to the source and see what else we can learn.
In this article, there’s an interesting approach recommended which involves each individual creating their own high-level storyboard first. These are then merged and synthesised by the group before the details of each stage are fleshed out. This speeds up the process and prevents the team getting stuck in lengthy debate on the first stages and then not having time for the later stages.
It’s also interesting to see how neat their whiteboards look compared to ours!
The ABCD approach to writing learning objectives
Identifying and articulating learning objectives is a key part of the storyboarding process. They’re an art / science all of their own.
This article proposes an ABCD formula for creating learning objectives (Audience, Behaviour, Condition, and Degree). These elements are then synthesised with the domains and levels expressed in Bloom’s Taxonomy to provide a method for constructing learning objectives that are clear and measurable.
Sure, bringing Bloom into learning objective creation isn’t necessarily leading edge, but we think this post brings fresh depth and insight into its application.
What we’re up to
👉️ On March 30th and 31st we’ll be delivering a free, 30-minute webinar on innovation strategies for remote teams.
We’ll be looking at:
- how to foster an innovation mindset
- tools and techniques for creative remote collaboration
- a framework for innovation that works for both remote and co-located teams
👉️ In April we’re talking about the environmental dimension of Inclusive Learning Experience Design (ILXD) and how it relates to the concept of learning spaces at the LXDCon conference.
See you in a couple of weeks for the next instalment of Learning Included!
All the best,
The LearnJam Team
