Feature Focus: Storyboarding in Elucidat

Mapping your learner’s needs to the flow of content and the goals you want them to achieve is creative, challenging, and one of the most interesting parts of learning design. No matter what framework you use, this process of working out how these elements come together is known as storyboarding. It’s traditionally done on paper, with multiple iterations of routes and flows to find the right one to meet your goals.

It seems like a lot of work. Why is storyboarding important?

Comprehensive storyboarding can prevent learning becoming overlong and clunky and ensures it meets your objectives. Time spent upfront in planning pays dividends down the line. By bringing together goals, actions and needs you can create a journey that engages learners, embeds knowledge and benefits everyone. 

Okay, so how can Elucidat help me?

Our interface provides a flexible way of seeing your course’s pages and chapters in one place. It’s as simple as picking up and dragging your page to where it needs to be, allowing you to test structures for your elearning in Elucidat itself. If you change your mind about the format of the page, or its location, both things are easily changed from this top-level view. 

The Pages view has been built specifically with storyboarding in mind. 

It sounds great, but how does it work?

Let’s work through an example. We’ll use one of our showcase pieces – a retail course designed to help store staff get to know their returns policy. View the finished course here (link opens in new tab).

Capture

Here’s the capture worksheet for this course build. We built out three personas which make up our audience for the learning, and mapped their needs.

To summarize: 

• All 3 audiences are time-poor
• Each persona would appreciate a flexible approach to learning 
• The content is dry and in some circumstances, already known – so it needs to be fun, engaging and relevant
• The learners’ actions need to contextualize why and how the returns policy is applied 

Conceptualize 

Now that we know who our audience is and what they need from this learning, we can start to build the structure of our course. 

Traditionally, we would have built our course structure in a document – which would look something like this:

Let’s see how that would look in the drag and drop interface:

With this view, you can build out the course structure quickly using visual representations of your content. This means that you can see an overview of the project and revise it multiple times until it’s right.

An example of how you might revise a course like this is by bringing the two theory elements – policy highlights and case studies – together. This would create a one-stop shop for everything a learner might need to know. To do this, you could just move the cards into this structure:

However, for our learning we have chosen the first approach, as it best meets the learner requirement of bitesize, quickly digestible learning, and allows learners to choose what they need, when they need it.

Create

From here, creating the content is as simple as diving in and out of each page as required. From the top-level view, you can access the Pages view by double clicking to open or using the three dots to the side of each card. 

Once we’ve finalized the content, it’s time to launch.

Cultivate

For this stage we’ll ask you to use your imagination slightly. Our staff aren’t really floor staff in a store. If they were and they were taking this course, we’d take a look at the analytics – probably on a fairly regular basis. 

We’d be keeping an eye out for the areas where we’re seeing more or less interaction, or even a drop-off of our learners. 

For example, say we hadn’t found another way around presenting policy other than in a text box. This page was where people were consistently not getting it right in knowledge checks. This is where we might want to iterate on this course. 

In Pages view, that iteration is easy. Changing a page type or rearranging content in an existing course is a matter of a few clicks. 

Elucidat will carry across as much of the content as possible when changes are made, but also warn you of any risks the changes pose to your course.

Because this course is designed to allow learners to choose which section to view – we’d also want to take a look at the most popular pages. This could inform future designs, or even be imported into courses with the inbuilt import functionality.

Why not try it yourself? 

Select the Projects tab, and open one of your Projects to go to the Pages view and start storyboarding! 

Interested in more tips on creating elearning? Check out our blog (opens in new tab).

If you have any questions, just get in touch by making a support request!