What’s your story?
Using storyboarding to design engaging online learning
What story do we want to tell our students? How often have you asked yourself this question in the past months? Right now it’s all too easy to be overwhelmed by all the tools available and even helpful pedagogical advice can fall on deaf ears if we dont take the time to reconnect with our teaching at a deeper level.
Are you tempted by the idea of breaking away from Zoom and designing asynchronous learning activities for your courses next semester? Now it’s the time to get to the drawing board. It’s all about story, structure, sequence and schedule. Add to that clarity and consistency, and you might be onto a winner. Here are some thoughts on how to approach this:
1. First of all, let go of the idea that students are not learning when you don’t see them or when you’re not around. Instead, challenge yourself to create activities you know will keep them engaged regardless of space and time. Remember who your students are and be creative. I’ve written some more on this here.
2. Start by creating a storyboard for your session. You can do it for the entire course but the more granular the better. Think of it like writing the script for a play or a movie: imagine the “bigger picture” first and then craft each separate scene. Here is a useful template from the Online Learning Toolkit.
3. Once the storyboard is ready, start narrating your story. Ideally, each activity has a clear purpose and is linked to the learning objectives you’ve set for your course/ session. It’s a good idea to keep those visible at all times and reference them as you go along in your design process. Here is a nice tool to help you build your learning objectives.
4. Make sure you provide clear instructions/ prompts as well as an estimated Time on Task (and deadline, where applicable). Also try to make any additional materials, templates, etc. available to students in one place, to set them up for success.
5. Still on the topic of communication: list all the tools necessary for completing each activity (digital / analogue) and provide guidance on their use if necessary. For group tasks make sure you create dedicated work spaces and explain any roles and expectations.
6. Once you are done with the different activities, check the sequence: make sure they build naturally on each other. Most importantly, try to look at them from students’ perspective: are the links between them clear? Think of how to make that explicit in the course. The result should make sense both to your students and to you. Be mindful of the fact that sometimes it makes sense for students to revisit past activities and feedback, so try to build time for that in the process as well.
7. Now it’s time to zoom out and take a good look at your story again. Are there too many activities? Are the explanations clear? If anything is superfluous or missing, now it’s your chance to adjust the design. Also, try to keep a bit of room for manoeuvre, you might need it.
8. One crucial thing to consider at this point: make sure students are not overloaded! The sum of activities should be similar to an equivalent face-to-face session. Also, one pitfall of designing asynchronous sessions is that you might over-design and give yourself too much work. Look out for that! You can read more about estimating time and workload for both you and your students here, including some useful tools and resources.
9. Most importantly: this should be a creative exercise. Ok, so you have to approach your session differently, but the principle is still the same: creating engaging learning spaces and narratives.
In October I facilitated an interesting workshop on this topic at the EDEN (European Distance and Elearning Network) Research Workshop. You can find a link to my presentation and a downloadable template you can use to plan your online learning activities.
Further resources
If you are interested in the topic and want to dive deeper, here are some useful resources:
- The Secret Weapon of Good Online Teaching: Discussion Forums: an excellent article by Flower Darby on strategies to make online discussion boards successful;
- The Online Lecture Toolkit: a wealth of resources to support you in reinventing the lecture and creating engaging online video content;
- Creating Microlectures: A New PocketPD Guide: research-backed tips from Michelle Pacansky-Brock for designing microlectures;
- Using Announcements to Give Narrative Shape to your Online Course;
- Community building activities: a great (and growing) collection of activity templates (including videos, instructional materials, etc) that can help you create and maintain an online community. Curated by Maha Bali, Mia Zamora and Autumm Caines.
Thanks for reading! I am looking forward to reading your thoughts or suggestions in the comments below. For more insights, analysis and tips on (higher) education, online teaching and UX design, follow me on Twitter and/or sign up to my newsletter!
