The Artisan E-Learning Storyboard

The Artisan E-Learning team recently had a great discussion about best practices with Storyboarding. Our biggest discussion item was what storyboard template we would use as the Artisan standard for all projects.  There are so many different options!  We came up with a storyboard that is different from the examples we used in our book, E-Learning Uncovered: From Concept to Execution, and I’d like to share our new design with you.

We had all used several different storyboard designs in the past and had some special needs for our universal storyboard.

• It needed to be in Microsoft Word so it would be easy to edit and add comments.
• It needed to be easy to reformat when it was approved to contain only the transcript so it could go to the narrator for recording.  Now we can delete the left column, make the right column fit the page, and send it off.
• It needed to contain the elements we would need in any course, no matter what the topic area.  Specifically:
• Screen Type (for example, presentation slide, screen interaction, or learning interaction)
• Page Number
• Screen Number
• Screen Name
• Onscreen Text
• Narration
• Graphic Suggestions
• Programming Notes (which could include thing such as links, media, or documents to include, special features, Interaction instruction, question type, remediation, and any other instructions to the programmer)
• Course Name, Date, and Version (which we put in the footnotes)

Here is our Universal Storyboard.

The Artisan Universal Storyboard

Click here to download a copy.

We decided to use a simple storyboard.  You can get much more complex with the elements you include.  If you want to see a list of some additional items you might want to include in your storyboard, click here .  I’d really like to hear what elements you have in your storyboards that I might have missed in this list.