How to Design eLearning Storyboards and 4 Key Elements

Growing demand for eLearning solutions amidst the global pandemic gave a serious impetus to the development of online courses and training programs. According to statistics, by 2025 the Massive Open Online Course Market (MOOC) would surpass the mark of $25 billion. Being such a crescive niche, it attracts more and more individuals who want to share their knowledge but who don't have prior experience developing training courses.

In this blog we will share some insights on how to design eLearning storyboards, will examine the interactive storyboarding design elements, and provide some other handful tips that you can use when designing an effective eLearning storyboard.

What Is an eLearning Storyboard?

Today storyboards are heavily used in the video industry where they come as sketched-out illustration sequences that visualize key scenes of a video and help better understand the story's pace. While the eLearning storyboard fully inherits its idea and goals from the sketched storyboard, its appearance is quite different.

It comes in the form of a document that is created before the development of the actual course and in which producers outline the entire structure of a future course and all its elements: visuals, texts, audio, page interactions, navigation, etc. Such a document includes a set of screens/pages each of which corresponds to a particular slide on the eLearning course.

As it is with the sketches, the eLearning storyboard works as a blueprint and helps producers keep all the work in line with the course subject and learning objectives. Now let's take a look at four key eLearning storyboard design elements that should be present on every page.

4 Key Elements to Create an Effective eLearning Storyboard

Header area

The upper part of a screen holds all the brief information about the current slide. It may contain, in particular: slide number, name/title, and slide subjective. The latter element is crucial since it specifies why each slide is there, in the first place.

Text

One of the most important elements of storyboards for designing interactive elearning and an area that will most likely take the largest part of the page. It may include such components as:

Audio instructions

This component is very important since it outlines the actual narration text that will accompany each slide of your eLearning course. We do recommend paying extra attention to this element and working on it separately — especially in those cases where you plan to involve a professional artist to do a voiceover for the course.

When writing out the audio narration text, make sure it matches the amount of learning material present on a page — to avoid voice gaps or even overlays. The narration copy should also come with guidelines for a voiceover artist, regarding tone, jargon/acronym pronunciation (if any), instructions for special symbols like brackets, etc.

Instructions for visuals & media

Here the course producers provide all the drafts/references or thumbnails for the illustrations. If the course is supposed to also include animation and/or video, then the corresponding instructions need to be provided as well: what type and style of animation are preferred, does it need to include branding elements or not, how the video lessons should be paced (format, camera angle, background, etc).

How to Design an eLearning Storyboard: Step-by-Step Development Process

Outline your course goals and objectives beforehand

The creation of a new storyboard — and e-learning course in general — starts with answering one single question: What outcome are we aiming to achieve here?

And the more detailed answer to that query you get the better. Let's say you want to create a course on full-stack web development for beginners. Assuming that the expected outcome regarding the course may be as follows:

The course objectives will directly reflect on the structure, kind, and contents of a storyboard.

Gather all the content

This is one of the most important stages in the custom e-learning storyboard design process, as here you collect all the information that a future course will be built upon. The definitions, concepts, course messages, research data, infographics, statistics, information from subject matter experts.

Set up assessment criteria

Identifying assessment criteria at the early stages of the storyboard design process will help to improve proficiency and boost learner's productivity. The assessment methods — or criteria — are inseparably linked to the course structure, and define 'points of assessment ' that have to be present in any interactive e-learning course.

The points of assessment can come in the form of tests, quizzes, task-based simulations, open-ended questions, etc. These are the most basic examples which need to be taken into account and embedded in the storyboard structure. However, if we take more complex methods — such as branching scenarios that involve multiple decision points, for example — these will have a stronger impact on the storyboard navigation and, thus, need to be thoroughly structured in advance.

Decide on the design method

Picking an appropriate design methodology helps to ensure that you won't get lost when developing an e-learning storyboard or an entire course. In the general case, there are four design models that you can choose from to build your course:

Map out course navigation

The course navigation will define the experience learners will get when going through your course, and to a significant extent, affect how well they complete the course. So, in order to provide a seamless UX, decide in advance where to locate buttons, and how to denote certain actions you want learners to take. Plan what happens if an incorrect answer is provided to a question on a slide or where to put links to third-party websites (If any are required).

Prevent cognitive overload

Since the well-written storyboard serves as a kind of a 'guide', it's vital to keep it clear and easy-to-process. Before doing a final revision of a storyboard, assess the amount of content that you will be delivering on each page/screen of your course. If some pages (or lessons) contain large chunks of text, try to break them down into smaller 'bite-sized' sections.

This will help to ensure that learners grasp the material in full before they move on to the next slide. Also, if possible, use visual or auditory instructions instead of plain text in order not to overburden the e-learning course.

Choose appropriate authoring tool

An authoring tool is a software that will actually help you create the storyboard once you've sorted out the content and structure of your future course. These solutions may come in different forms — for basic courses e-learning developers commonly use Microsoft Word or Powerpoint, while for more sophisticated training programs the use of dedicated software (such as Elearning Art) is more preferable.

All these tools can suit the creation of an e-learning course, so when picking a particular tool, we advise you to focus on your actual goals first. Like "What features do I want to see in an authoring tool?", "Will this tool makes my life (read course production) easier?", '"Is it able to provide me with all the needed interactions and custom e-learning storyboard design elements?", etc.

Concluding Remarks

And that was it. As you see, storyboards play a major role in the development of eLearning courses. They help producers to correctly structure the future product, witness possible gaps and organize course narrative more effectively. Before proceeding to create a storyboard we recommend establishing a clear development plan and figure out what your goals regarding the storyboarding process are, and what outcomes you expect it to bring.

If you are looking for professional help creating an e-learning storyboard or an entire training program, reach out to WTT-Solutions. For more than five years we've been providing software development services for SMEs and large enterprises across a wide range of niches and markets: Martech, Edtech, BI and ML, Mobile development, AI, and more. To get a FREE consultation from one of our managers, fill a form in the top right corner of this page and we'll get in touch with you in no time!