July 2015 – Memorable Learning

Building a portfolio – episode 3

Completing the storyboards

In week 2 of the project, I laid out the goals for my Storyline project and organized the content. This week I am writing the storyboards – the planning documents that show how the project will be constructed.

It’s tempting to think that, once you have structured your content, that you have a design. Had I been developing a course, I would have gone through an extra set of discussions with the SME about the priorities for the content and distilled an outline with specific goals (in the form of key learning points) for each level of the outline. As it was, I succumbed to the temptation to think that all my content structure was equally important, and I plowed ahead.

There are a lot of storyboard templates, but they share common information:

Reference number – everyone has a favorite way of numbering screens.
Content – the exact text that will go on the screen, identified by areas on the screen.
Navigation – These direct the flow of the content, and in addition to the normal Next and Prev buttons, might include branching menus, buttons or sliders for interactions, radio buttons and checkboxes.
Graphics and media – audio scripts, reference to graphics, animations, videos, etc. that will be added to the screen. Think of this as your property list.
Development notes – everything else you want the developer to know, even if you are developing the project yourself. This is where you can describe everything from color to the interaction on the screen.

Other things I have seen added to storyboards include compliance mapping (mapping the storyboard to the high level design document), review notes, and specialty templates such as quizzes or drag-and-drop interactions. What’s important is that you write down all the information needed for the developer, either in text specifications or by graphically designing each screen.

The storyboard tool you choose depends primarily on you and your project. There are successful storyboards created in word processors (Word), presentation tools (Keynote), diagramming tools (Visio, Twine), and specialized storyboarding tools (Storyboard That, Amazon Storyteller). I chose PowerPoint for a couple of reasons: the ability to lay out the page and write to the space I have, then import directly to Storyline, master pages, color themes, and all.

Bumps in the road

One of the reasons to use PowerPoint was to start working on the visual design. I decided to look at a number of other people’s projects for ideas.

Have I mentioned that I am easily distracted? When I have a deadline, I can focus on a task as well as anyone, but if I am researching a topic, a shiny object that pops up in the search engine can lead me off-topic in a hurry.

So it was when I started to look at other people’s marketing layouts. So many styles to look at! So many ideas! Articulate’s Elearning Heroes community has a ton of such templates that I could download. Goodness galore! I could have spent days looking at them – okay, I did spend a good part of 2 days looking at them. Some of them were so wonderful that I just sat and marveled at them.

But I finally dragged myself out of Google and started to create the template. Because of the tables (see last week’s column) I thought I wanted a tabbed layout, and I had found several projects with interesting ways to set up tabs. I then entered the content into the storyboard template. I’ll skip over the details and upload the first few pages of the storyboard.

I very quickly realized that, because of the way I was presenting the content (services and industry experience), I could not use the standard bullet point descriptions of projects that were in my current resumes. My message was not “I was the instructional designer for these 25 projects”; they were stories about, for example, how my colleagues and I had solved a specific problem for a client by simplifying the design of her course. I needed to rewrite almost all of the stories that would appear in the project.

And that’s when I made my mistake. Because I had not prioritized the content while structuring it, I discovered that I had over 40 stories to write. If anyone else were my client, I would have gone to them and said “This is too much. No one will read that much material, and is it really critical to your message?” But because I was my own client, I ignored my process and plunged ahead to write them all. After all, Scheherazade had told a thousand tales; surely I could write forty.

Will I complete the writing and move on to visual design? Or will I find a way to simplify? Stay tuned!

Do you have a favorite storyboarding template you’d like to share? Send me a link and I’ll add it to a future post!

Building a portfolio – episode 2

I become my client

It’s been about three weeks since I wrote the first episode of this saga, and about a week since I posted it. In the intervening time, I’ve approached the as I would if I were a client. This may complicate the telling of the story.

If I were a client, this is how I would work with me:

find out what my goals are, and what I want to accomplish in the project
establish the key messages I want to get across and identify my priorities
locate and structure the content to create those messages
build up storyboards with content (episode 3)
design the project for optimal visual impact (episode 4)
build and test the project (episodes 5 and 6)
launch the final, approved product (episode 6)

So there’s a lot to cover today. Of course, if I were a new client, there would be more I would want to know: sponsorship, communication, company culture, meeting the SMEs, doing a needs analysis, and so forth. But I think I know this client reasonably well.

My goals are two-fold: improve my skills with Storyline 2™, and create an online portfolio showcasing my skills and experience. The end product will be posted on my web site at www.memorable-learning.com.

Notice that nowhere did I use the term training? Once I recognized that I was creating a marketing piece rather than a training piece, the framework for the project began to appear.

As I put details on my goals, it became clear that I wanted the reader to get four things out of the project:

Understand the services I offer: I am an instructional designer and elearning developer, with deep experience in collecting and structuring content, and in looking at the overall needs of an organization in change.
Walk the path that got me to where I am today: the experience I have had in a variety of industries.
Appreciate a well-crafted Storyline project that tells my stories.
Learn about my background and how to contact me.

That sounds like a pretty firm structure. I am ready to move on to the content.

Over time, I have built a lot of resumes, each one either an update of a previous one, or a presentation of a specific set of skills. There was no master document with descriptions of each project I’ve done over the years. Well, there was one – I had started a CV (curriculum vitae, the resume of academe) when I was in grad school, and until a few years ago, I had dutifully added a bullet point about each new project as it was completed. It ran to 12 pages, and had not been updated since 2003.

Have you ever tried to remember everything of note you’ve done in the last 12 years?

Fortunately, I had kept copies of my timesheets for that period (no, I don’t know why I kept them, just never deleted them) so I could identify which projects were done when. I captured these in a small Word template and tried to fill in as much detail as possible. There were 27 projects.

So back to the structure. I had identified four services: instructional designer, content developer / editor, elearning developer, and change mThe four are interrelated, but there are some specific aspects of each that I wanted to talk about. Once I laid out these topics, my structure began to look like this:

ID	Content	Elearning	Change
Analyzing needs Defining goals Designing for best effect Working with experts Delivering and coaching Evaluating outcomes	Multinational experts Regulated environment Technologists Thought leaders Public service experts	Blended curricula Repurposing to elearning Regulated environment Dedicated elearns Virtual classrooms	Change strategy Needs analysis Communication planning Teaming for success Workforce alignment Change training

And the same analysis for the experience in industries yielded this table:

Life Sciences	Technology	Finance	Retail	Public Service
Scientist Process alignment Risk management Change strategy Technology	Training new processes Distributing expert knowledge Enabling public utilities Training custom systems	Enabling across divisions Merging accounts payable Training IM auditors Training bank auditors Implementing financial ERP Automating advertising	Restaurant financials Transformed stores Cosmetics supply chain Retail consultant training	County government Federal change managers Federal consultants

It’s still a lot of topics, and I had to write a short description of each of them. More on that next week.

Lesson learned: Never throw away anything. You might need it some day.

Building a portfolio – episode 1

I’ve been building elearning products for clients since 1999, and what do I have to show for it? Lots of proprietary notes and drafts, and precious little in the way of samples that I can show potential clients.

Mind you, I’m not complaining. Until recently, I worked for large organizations where I could point to other projects for the same company as my portfolio. Because these large firms generally held that their information was proprietary (and the fact that most final products were stored on secure course management systems), I could not take any of my finished work with me when the project was completed.

But now I am on my own again, and trying to increase my elearning business. For that I need a portfolio. Some things are fairly easy: I’ve kept written descriptions of most of the projects I did over the years, so I have the raw materials for case studies and resumes. Templates for some of the work, like stakeholder analyses and user guides, can be made into vanilla forms and checklists. But finished courses, especially elearning modules, are a different matter. Those I must create from scratch.

Over the next few weeks, I will be documenting the steps to creating an elearning portfolio from personal experience. I’ve read a number of helpful websites and blogs, but at the end of the day, it’s down to me to build it (and hope that, having built it, they will come). So stay tuned for new adventures in learning.

The first step is probably the hardest: deciding what to build.

The sample should be relatively small (a short module or two, maybe a quiz), and I should be able to create a complete package showing the process from initial thought process to final output. Check.
I am fluent in three elearning tools (Lectora, Articulate, and, to a lesser degree, Storyline 2), so to cover all bases, I could create a sample in each of them (I’ll address my adventures with these programs another day).

Now all I am missing is the content – what will the modules be about?

At first I thought, “perhaps some side issue with my latest project?” I’m just completed on a series of virtual classroom sessions tangentially involved with Common Core standards for schools, so I thought perhaps a short history of Common Core might be interesting. Did some research, and maybe that will become one of the new modules.

Then I got to thinking about other projects might lend themselves a short, interactive, colorful, interesting elearn. Lots of things there. But perhaps the most critical thing was updating my resume. Now there’s an idea: encapsulating my past so that I could pull it up for interviews. Let’s see where that goes.

Stay tuned for the next episode: high level design and storyboards.