I'm finding it challenging to understand the logic and think in a non-linear way when designing a course for production in Storyline. Does anyone have a storyboard they would be willing to share which would show your production plan for executing your design for a Storyline project?
Hi Marilyn! What kind of course are you designing? Have you already seen the free downloadable storyboards here? Although they're not specific to Storyline, they contain some helpful ways of thinking about how to map out your content.Is there a specific aspect of the non-linear stuff that you're feeling stumped on? Maybe we can help you noodle on some tips.
I'm designing various soft skill type courses, leadership, compliance, etc. I use storyboards with Articulate courses. I'm curious what that looks like for Storyline - production notes when using layers, triggers, variables, etc. It would help me understand the build process. I haven't gotten my head around building out a single slide using layers vs linking a number of slides.
Sounds like you have a cool project in front of you, Marilyn! There are a lot of ways to build out interactivity in Storyline, so I think the first step would be to nail your performance objectives, and then decide how your course will help learners meet those objectives -- i.e., what sorts of activities, interactions, or assessments will you use to help them obtain mastery?
For example, in your soft skill/leadership courses, you might want to make those scenario-based, where you create a separate scene for each scenario and have learners walk through a challenge situation (or a series of them?) and let them decide how to respond to each one. In that case, you'd probably want to create some branched paths with customized feedback.
For other types of courses, such as compliance courses, you might be better of creating more modular job-aid-style content instead, just because learners probably need a quick way to find critical info and an immersive scenario-based course might not be as necessary.
I'm sure you'll get lots of people chiming in with their favorite ways to map out stuff like this... to be honest my preferred way of noodling out the flow of a course is to sit down with paper/pencil/sticky notes and do a brainstorm of how I'll build each activity or section of a course, sketching the path as I go. And then from there, once it feels like a solid design I'll do a rapid prototype right in Storyline.
Jeanette gives some good advice here about drawing it out, using sticky notes etc and then prototyping in storyline.
For branched non-linear content I also use a tool called Twine - it is a kind of visual interactive story editor. You can design your story paths using simple text statements and Twine visually maps it out for you. I moved from using Artic Studio to Stotyline and I found that using Twine helped me to develop my non-linear thinking.
5 Replies
Hi Marilyn! What kind of course are you designing? Have you already seen the free downloadable storyboards here? Although they're not specific to Storyline, they contain some helpful ways of thinking about how to map out your content.Is there a specific aspect of the non-linear stuff that you're feeling stumped on? Maybe we can help you noodle on some tips.
I'm designing various soft skill type courses, leadership, compliance, etc. I use storyboards with Articulate courses. I'm curious what that looks like for Storyline - production notes when using layers, triggers, variables, etc. It would help me understand the build process. I haven't gotten my head around building out a single slide using layers vs linking a number of slides.
Sounds like you have a cool project in front of you, Marilyn! There are a lot of ways to build out interactivity in Storyline, so I think the first step would be to nail your performance objectives, and then decide how your course will help learners meet those objectives -- i.e., what sorts of activities, interactions, or assessments will you use to help them obtain mastery?
For example, in your soft skill/leadership courses, you might want to make those scenario-based, where you create a separate scene for each scenario and have learners walk through a challenge situation (or a series of them?) and let them decide how to respond to each one. In that case, you'd probably want to create some branched paths with customized feedback.
For other types of courses, such as compliance courses, you might be better of creating more modular job-aid-style content instead, just because learners probably need a quick way to find critical info and an immersive scenario-based course might not be as necessary.
I'm sure you'll get lots of people chiming in with their favorite ways to map out stuff like this... to be honest my preferred way of noodling out the flow of a course is to sit down with paper/pencil/sticky notes and do a brainstorm of how I'll build each activity or section of a course, sketching the path as I go. And then from there, once it feels like a solid design I'll do a rapid prototype right in Storyline.
Hi Marilyn,
Jeanette gives some good advice here about drawing it out, using sticky notes etc and then prototyping in storyline.
For branched non-linear content I also use a tool called Twine - it is a kind of visual interactive story editor. You can design your story paths using simple text statements and Twine visually maps it out for you. I moved from using Artic Studio to Stotyline and I found that using Twine helped me to develop my non-linear thinking.
You can download Twine here:
http://gimcrackd.com/etc/src/
Best of luck with your projects!
Fiona.
Interesting link - Twine. Thanks Fiona.
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