How to Storyboard in Elucidat

Capture, Conceptualize, Create, Cultivate, Commercialize. These are the 5Cs which we believe underpin successful elearning projects. Using the updated project structure editor within Elucidat means that the platform helps with 4 out of the 5 stages of creating transformational learning in one place; and your team can produce real-life impact, even quicker.

Mapping your learner’s needs to the flow of content and the goals 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?

Without comprehensive storyboarding, learning runs the risk of becoming overlong, clunky or not meeting your objectives. Ultimately that makes it not worth yours, your learners, or your businesses time. By bringing together goals, actions and needs you can create a journey that engages learners, embeds the knowledge and benefits everyone. 

Okay, so, how can Elucidat help me?

We’ve updated our interface to include a new, flexible way of seeing your courses 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 piece of digital learning in Elucidat itself. And if you change your mind about the format of the page, or its location – both things are easily changed from this top-level view. 

This view – found within Projects – has been built specifically with storyboarding in mind. 

It sounds great, but how does it actually 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)

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 

So 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:

But how would that 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 bringing the two theory elements – policy highlights and case studies – together. It would create a one-stop shop for everything a learner might need to know. To do it, you could just move the cards into this structure:

But, for our learning we decided on the original approach as it best met the learner requirement of bitesize, quickly digestible learning – and allows learners to choose what they need, when.

Create

So then creating the content was as simple as diving in and out of each page as required. From the top level view, you can access the editor via a double click or using the three dots to the side of each card. Read more about editing in Elucidat.

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

Cultivate

Now for this stage we’ll ask you to use your imagination slightly. Our staff aren’t really floor staff in a store. But 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’d not found another way around presenting policy other than in a text box. This page was where people were consistently not getting right in knowledge checks. This is where we might want to iterate on this course. 

In this updated view, that iteration is now easier than ever. 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, but also warn you of any risks the changes pose to your course.

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

Want to try it for yourself?

Ready to try storyboarding in Elucidat for yourself? The update goes live soon. Or if you’re not yet a customer why not book a demo to see it in action?