What a storyboard is and how to use it in your online courses
For those of us who create online courses, whether for clients or for complex programs, learning to use a storyboard is essential, because it simplifies so much of the process. With it, everyone involved in the project can look at the same document and know what to do, give feedback and get involved, without needing multiple documents. And for the instructional designer, the storyboard is also essential for planning the course itself. Put simply: what is a storyboard? The storyboard is a visual document of how your story will be told. It comes from film and animation, where what will happen in a scene is planned frame by frame. In film, for example, the storyboard shows how scenes are framed at the time of shooting, which characters are on screen and what is being said at that moment. In animation, the storyboard can show, frame by frame, which animation will be made. Will the animated character jump or crouch? Notice that this tool tells the animator what to animate, the illustrator what to draw, the composer what to compose, and so on. I'm not a film or animation specialist. In online courses, a storyboard is used to design, screen by screen, which components will appear on each screen. For example, whether the lesson is a video, a text, a drag-and-drop element, a podcast and so on. Depending on the complexity of the project, you may have instructional designers, animators, video producers and even developers all using the same storyboard. That's the beauty of this tool: you can create a single document for everyone involved in the project.
Why use a storyboard?
Before we get into creating a storyboard, it's important to understand why we make one in the first place. The key point is that you won't always need one. A storyboard is most useful when several people work on the same project or when the course is very complex. For example, you may not need a storyboard for a course like this one, which has only short videos and a few sentences. For this storyboard course I ironically didn't use one. I created a Word document with the syllabus and the script, which I'm reading right now. However, for my Instructional Design First Steps course, which involved several types of learning objects, a storyboard was almost mandatory. A storyboard is also very useful for working as a team and saving time re-explaining content. For example, even if only two people are working on a simple course project, it can last weeks or months. A storyboard will help you plan and avoid rework, since all the content will be documented. Of course, for that you can choose a simpler version of a storyboard, such as a plain document file. In a storyboard, you show which animations there will be, where the video goes, the quiz, the next button and so on. There are more complex storyboards that even let you insert an animation prototype, and others where you insert a colored block and say "animation goes here." It depends on what you want to show and, of course, on how well your client can imagine the result. I have clients, for example, who panic when I show a gray block and say "a video goes here." They don't get it. For that client, it has to be a high-fidelity storyboard.
