Part II Instructional design - Everything Five Square Learning Can Do For You and Your Business

In our last blog we discussed what instructional design is and how Five Square Learning’s highly qualified instructional designers can help you impart the knowledge you need your employees to know in engaging, effective, and creative courses. In this blog, we will discuss another tool Five Square Learning uses to create the best and most helpful courses for you and your business, the storyboard.

What exactly is a storyboard and how does it figure into an eLearning course, you may ask? That’s exactly what this blog post aims to enlighten you on. You can think of a storyboard as an excellent graphic organizer. These graphic organizers are visual representations of the information that will be presented in a particular course.

This storyboard and all the graphic organizers come together to form an outline for the course Five Square Learning will design for you. The information in the storyboard may come from you, or you may come to Five Square Learning with the learning objectives you want the course to cover, or you might just have an idea and want Five Square Learning to do it all. They are prepared for any of your needs and however much information you come to them with.

Once they have the information, learning objectives, or ideas they will work with their instructional designers and qualified team members to begin outlining the content of the course. This will move forward to a rapid prototype and finally a storyboard. This storyboard must be written and approved by you, their client, before Five Square Learning moves onto programing the eLearning course.

If you are not satisfied with anything at this point in the process, Five Square Learning will work with you to make any needed adjustments or additions. It is in this way that they save time for you and themselves, by not moving forward with something until it is exactly where you want it to be.

At a minimum, Five Square Learning aims to have the following information on each graphic organizer or slide: slide title, page number, what the learner will see on the screen, what the learner will hear, what the learner will do on the screen- such as click this box, or answer this question etc, and finally, a description of any animated elements.

Once you have taken a look at the storyboard and any changes or additions have been made, you will give Five Square Learning the go ahead to move forward with your project or course. Their aim is to be creative and innovative to design an engaging, effective, and helpful course for you and your employees.

So while most storyboards are linear, with each slide leading to the next, Five Square Learning uses tools like Storyline to break that mold. With these tools they can create courses that branch - non-linear interactions that are more exploratory, immersive, and fun for the learner, all while imparting the neecded knowledge you are hoping your employees will gain.