One of the Communities in Practice workshops I helped organize for TD Cascadia focused on storyboarding during the planning phase for building e-learning.

After a wonderful presentation from my former colleague and instructional design expert Megan Gesing, we broke into groups and put what we learned into practice.

Because this practice was about the planning / storyboard phase, it was agnostic to which e-learning authoring tools we would use. The participants all used a variety of tools in their jobs – Rise, Articulate 360, Camtasia, Captivate, and others.

Over the next few collaboration sessions, we selected a topic (Project Management for Instructional Designers), agreed on the flow for the course, and each took a section for the storyboard document.

There are many formats to choose from for the storyboard document. We went with Google Slides and Google Docs because it was easy for us all to work together remotely with those tools. At work, I used PowerPoint and Word (and sometimes Excel) for this.

We each built presentation slides to be used as placeholders – the course front page, objectives, course navigation, and section headers, assessment questions.

We placed screenshots of these slides into a Google Doc we shared, then added the structure in a series of tables. In the left column of the tables, we had labels for the elements that needed to be part of the e-learning – things like screen header, on-screen text, and voiceover. In the right column, the description of that element with more information about what we intend to set up in the authoring software.

Screen Header	Welcome to the Four Phases of Project Management!
On-Screen Text	Click the Introduction tile to begin. <Image Caption 1> INTRODUCTION <Image Caption 2> INITIATE <Image Caption 3> PLAN <Image Caption 4> MANAGE <Image Caption 5> CLOSE <Image Caption 6> KEY TAKEAWAYS
Voiceover	Welcome to the Four Phases of Project Management.This eLearning course will take approximately XX minutes to complete.This training will enhance your understanding of the four phases project management and how applying them can lead to more successful project outcomes.  This course will include an introduction, followed by the four phases–initiate, plan, manage, and close–and some key takeaways to help you begin to apply these concepts to your next project.Click the Introduction tile to begin.
Interaction/ Programming	Image captions appear in sync with narration. Only the introduction tile is available on this slide. The others gray out as the timeline ends.
Image	tile1.png; tile2.png; tile3.png; tile4.png; tile5.png, tile6.png

In my work at Advance Local, I had built courses in PowerPoint (for live facilitation), Lectora, Camtasia, and Rise. Most of my training was ILT / VILT. From that perspective, I still got a lot out of the workshop with my peers.

• I was able to see my course more holistically.
• The storyboard helped me envision how the learning experience would unfold.
• I was able to better my plan the exercises and assessments.
• New ideas emerged for multi-modal learning – pre- or post-work activities, job references, or microlearning.

The storyboarding habit can help instructional designers and also those building ILT / VILT courses do a better job of connecting our learners with learning objectives for a better, “stickier” business outcome.