Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Using Storyboarding To Visualize Instructional Design Services

By Marissa Velazquez


Instructional design services in any eLearning course should integrate the use of visual storyboards as part of their plans. Great storyboards can help in saving plenty in terms of company time, money and also in avoiding your clients from been surprised or disappointed when they get a chance to view the final product. The visual storyboard helps create a bridge between what is to be expected and what the original concept was.

The storyboards aid designers working on training and evaluation materials with a means of communicating with clients, industry experts and the developers. A storyboard provides the best opportunity for one to collect, organize and review content, provide visuals, give instructions, explain animation and write the narration. There are different storyboard formats available but all of them adopt the elements of content, visuals, narration, graphic designer requirements and developer instructions to communicate more effectively.

In a storyboard, content is important especially to the industry expert who seeks to view and understand the message for perusal even before it is presented to the client. The expert is expected to evaluate as well as approve any content related to the project. This way, any information included is checked for validity and ensure that at the end of the day it help in building skills of the learner.

In storyboarding, a picture is really worth a thousand words. Such visuals ought to include graphical elements that are to be presented on any page including color of font and size. Other visuals that help in telling the story and worthy of consideration include text placement, drawings, images, navigation and background.

For eLearning projects that seek to include the use of closed captioning and voice over talent, it is crucial to add narration that will help industry experts and developers evaluate the piece. Industry experts are solely tasked with approving or disapproving the content used in the narration. The developers, on the other hand, work with designers to ensure that narration works well with the on-screen elements.

Whether the images come directly from the client or are been developed by graphic designers, it is important to ensure that they go along with the storyboard's theme. Some graphics and images can easily be changed by adding simple elements like drop shadows and other such elements. Other images however, may require the designer to replace the background to something that is relevant to the set theme.

For developers, storyboards essentially indicate what they should know about building or programming the course. The instructions contained also provide the experts and approvers with a snippet into how the final product will work and look like once complete. The notes written by developers explain the various navigational buttons including any other elements that are built into the course.

A storyboard is a very important communication tool for instructional design services to become a success. It not only tells the story, but can also help approvers, niche experts and clients visualize and understand the product. With storyboards, designers are able to communicate, narration provided to voice-over talents, visuals to graphic designers and the technical information relayed to developers thereby relaying to all the involved parties through visuals and text what they ought to do in order to turn the vision into reality on the learner's screen.




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