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Why Collaborative Storyboard Technology Is Mission Critical

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Sunday, October 15, 2006 - by Eric Rosen

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Here's how to produce superior e-learning more efficiently with collaborative storyboard technology.

Many e-learning practitioners express the sentiment of feeling trapped by the traditional process of producing content. They bristle at how it consumes excessive manpower, and they share a common desire to reform the process. However, because they are so close to the problem domain, most practitioners don't know where to begin. Enter collaborative storyboard technology.

A fresh perspective on a classic challenge

To date, systems have focused mainly on the solitary task of authoring content in much the same way that word processors facilitate document creation. Improvements in traditional authoring technology typically are not felt beyond the digital artist and programmer communities.

Acknowledging the e-learning project team as a collective group in need of tools to support how work flows among them has gone unaddressed. All stakeholders benefit when e-learning project teams transition away from the traditional approach to development to a more collaborative solution built around their unique way of working together.

A key success factor of most projects is the storyboarding process. Storyboards are to e-learning content what blueprints are to a building. Clients, subject matter experts, and team members use storyboards to reach consensus on the product's final form. This includes specifying the breadth and depth of the content, how it will be conveyed to learners, and any learning outcomes.

Why storyboarding is critical

Storyboarding -At-A-Glance Step 1: Draft Storyboard Content What we do at this level: Instructional design, setup overall structure of project
Activity 1	Organize content outlines and learning objectives
Activity 2	Write instructional text, audio and assessment questions
Step 2: Determine Content AssetsWhat we do at this level: Scene fulfillment, assign asset creation tasks
Activity 3	Devise schema to manage media assets (audio, graphics, video, etc.)
Activity 4	Provide programming notes to developers for each asset
Step 3: Revise StoryboardsWhat we do at this level: Update storyboards based on alpha / beta reviews
Activity 5	Incorporate feedback from clients, experts and developers

It's difficult to overemphasize how important it is to "get storyboarding right" the first time. Yet, many e-learning projects owe their cost overruns, missed deadlines, and attenuated effectiveness to missteps during the storyboarding phase. Whether you provide learning services in-house or as a vendor, chances are you've attended an alpha or beta review and heard the client utter those unbearable words, "This is not what I thought we agreed on." Nevertheless, outcomes like this are difficult to avoid in a traditional development setting.

To deliver effective learning experiences on time and within budget, project team members need storyboards to help them achieve an early agreement regarding the myriad of tasks to be identified and executed. Collaborative solutions with dedicated storyboarding tools and an intuitive work flow simplify this process by several orders of magnitude.

Storyboarding is a social process

The storyboarding phase is the ideal time for team members to make all design issues known because this is when the cost of experimentation is lowest. If matters of vision, learning theory, media selection, content organization, user interface, narration, and interactivity are ironed out during storyboarding phase, a final product valuable to the business can be delivered in an efficient and timely manner.

Experience with traditional approaches paints an e-learning landscape littered with low potency courseware and high rates of abandonment by learners. By comparing traditional and collaborative storyboarding, we see how collaborative storyboarding relieves project teams of tedious value-draining activities while freeing them to tackle learning challenges with inspiration and creativity.

Step 1: Draft storyboard content

Activity 1: Organize content outlines and learning objectives
Challenge Scenario - Sudden, unexpected changes to content outline After the instructional designer outlines content using a certain nomenclature with a fixed degree of granularity (Course > Lesson > Subject > Topic > Screen), requirements change. Outline must reflect new requirements (Course > SCORM SCO > Topic > Screen).
Traditional Approach: Cope with Change	Collaborative Solutions: Anticipate Change
The instructional designer is forced to spend precious design time revising Microsoft Word documents in multiple places. Moreover, she needs to follow-up with an email to team members advising them of the change.The email has attachments which clog multiple Inboxes. Even if the email links to a file on a shared network drive, the seeds of future version control problems are sown if she keeps the most up-to-date file on her computer. Email correspondence is separate from any project-related repository. Unintentionally, this creates another "silo" undermining group productivity.	On a web-enabled, database-driven collaboration platform, a project holds accounts for each reviewer and developer. Instantly, team members can view revisions. Automated notifications announce revisions to all via email with links back to the system.The instructional designer easily modifies nomenclature, granularity, and screen flow using a simple drag-and-drop interface to create and revise outlines relate learning objectives to the appropriate outline level resequence screens. File management and version control are no longer part of her job description.

Activity 2: Write instructional text, audio and assessment questions
Challenge Scenario - Competition forces accelerated product release date Training development time truncated, review cycle squeezed. The instructional designer presses client, subject matter experts, and team for comments on the wording of text, voice-overs, and quiz content.
Traditional Approach: No Shared Workspace Scatters People and Their Contributions	Collaborative Solutions: Shared Workspace Unites People and Their Work, Saves Time
Several times a day, the instructional designer is interrupted from her work when clients, subject matter experts, and team members offer feedback. Some respond using instant messaging, others email their recommendations, and the rest reach her by phone.Though he is an excellent multi-tasker, this frayed approach to capturing feedback is beginning to take its toll. Occasionally, changes to the storyboard differ in subtle but material ways from what was intended, setting the stage for client-team disconnects later on. The instructional designer is the only person with access to the most up-to-date storyboard file. As a result, other team members don't incorporate their colleagues' remarks when responding. Such bottlenecks to team awareness prevent the final product from reaching its maximum teaching potential.	Account holders can view or proffer comments anytime using real-time chat, email, and forum-style posting all tied to the current project.With the instructional designer relieved of excessive clerical duties, the time she spent soliciting, coordinating, and transcribing feedback shifts to incorporating the better-informed responses of her colleagues. Dependencies on the interpretations of one person are practically eliminated, paving the way for a final product with maximum teaching potential.

Step 2: Determine content assets

Activity 3: Devise schema to manage media assets (audio, graphics, video)
Challenge Scenario - Instructional designer rearranges multiple screens To manage media assets, the instructional designer names files based on first screen to use them and their general purpose. The designer faces storyboard administration quandary: embed assets in storyboard file or mention them by filename?
Traditional Approach: Sprawling Media Assets Spiral Out of Control	Collaborative Solutions: Automated Asset Management Supports Current & Future Projects
Though the instructional designer always keeps her instance of the storyboard up-to-date, includes a legend explaining her asset naming conventions, and frequently distributes it to everyone, team members edit the wrong item or ask her questions she thinks are self-explanatory.She decides to rearrange a few screens. Before she can assess the full impact on instruction and rewrite selected passages, she must tell the graphic artist and Flash developer to rename their files while she does the same with dozens, if not hundreds, of assets under her control. With a team review approaching, the storyboard bloats. Email bounce-backs hinder her efforts to keep everyone up-to-date. Substituting filenames in place of graphics reduces file size but sacrifices clarity. With a less visual storyboard, she worries about disconnects with her customer later on.	In a collaborative context, team members can forget about awkward file naming conventions. Instead, they tag assets with descriptive information for instant retrieval and reuse in any project. Account holders can view an assest's status, plus any notes or comments it generated.No matter how much storyboards change, the instructional designer and her media developers are shielded from busywork like cutting and pasting sections of a document, conforming to the demands of email, renaming files, and other chores aimed at salvaging value. She merely moves screens and the new sequence is ready for all to see. She can now focus on tweaking screen text based on the new sequence while developers continue doing what they do best: creating aesthetic media and interactive experiences.

Activity 4: Provide programming notes to developers for each asset
Challenge Scenario - Instructional designer requests slew of new assets While writing storyboards and pondering the learning needs of her audience, the instructional designer decides additional graphics and animations are necessary. New administrative quandary arises: enter assets and programming notes in related storyboard scene or list them in separate file?
Traditional Approach: Growing Administrative Load Crushes Productivity	Collaborative Solutions: Administrative Hurdles Eliminated, Productivity Soars
The instructional designer takes on yet another burden by opting to perform both tasks: revising her storyboard and keeping a list of new asset requests in a separate file. The former is a tactic to ensure her storyboard file remains the sole place to find an asset in context. The latter lists assets by filename, completion status, and first scene in order to remain lightweight and easy-to-use.Frustrations mount as scenes are re-arranged. He updates his storyboard, revises scene references in the asset request file, and explains all this to the developers using email with attachments. Developers get confused and have trouble reading programming notes jammed into an already unwieldy storyboard. Worse, developers are too busy to update their instance of the asset request file. The instructional designer finds it nearly impossible to keep his version complete and accurate.	With a centralized, database-driven storyboard, team members easily view assets with review notes and comments tidily awaiting their next mouse click.The instructional designer can assign assets to developers without worrying about administrative overhead. The system offers a flexible way to specify what each team member can do or see in relation to a project. Each team member gets personalized access to those media assets relevant to their assigned tasks or areas of expertise. Developers use their preferred authoring tools, upload assets already completed or in-progress, and with a quick menu selection, specify the asset's status. Maintaining the status of assets used to be a tedious, time-consuming chore necessary to preserve value while diluting it at the same time. Now, it practically takes care of itself.

Step 3: Revise storyboards

Activity 5: Incorporate feedback from clients, experts and developers
Challenge Scenario - Overcome barriers of location, culture, and dense text Reviewers and experts scattered among time zones, cultures, and professions. The instructional designer seeks faster response from business and subject matter experts but lacks clout. Dense storyboard text bogs down everyone's effort to imagine a superior final product.
Traditional Approach: Shared Vision Remains Elusive, Quality Suffers	Collaborative Solutions: Vivid Shared Vision Attained, Quality Surges
The instructional designer emails storyboard file, instructs her distribution list to respond by inserting comments, and requests they email it back to the list.Few people hit "Reply-to-All" as a way of sharing comments with the group. Even fewer incorporate the feedback of others when composing their own. She puzzles over whether she should respond to the list or the individual. With staffing in all departments at historically low levels, businesspeople and subject matter experts do their best with limited time to read dense text, ponder, write, and respond. Despite laboring heroically to capture everyone's input and reconcile their remarks, the instructional designer's confidence in a true "meeting of the minds" among stakeholders is shaky at sign-off and she wonders if cost overruns will plague the production phase.	In a collaborative storyboarding environment, accountholders can view all comments of their colleagues. This encourages a healthy cross-breeding of perspectives just as any inter-disciplinary project should.Less obvious, when a team member's contribution is not commensurate with their role on the project, it shows. As a result, contributors are more timely and responsive. With tools designed specifically for storyboarding, comments can appear at any level - asset, screen, section, or course. This clarifies the scope of a comment otherwise ambiguous in a text-based storyboard. Finally, with visual storyboarding capabilities, all assets appear in their native form " text, graphics, audio, video and Flash animations. Project team members no longer need a film director's skill at envisioning how scripts translate to screen. Confidence in a true "meeting of the minds" at sign-off is widely held and she is eager to get started with the production phase.

Bottom line

Eliminating administrative chores, scheduling fewer conference calls, and producing deliverables you can be proud of will make your learning team captain of its own destiny. To achieve this goal, consider these alternatives.

Build your own. If your team has the skills and resources to design and develop a collaborative storyboarding system, this is feasible. Your system's level of sophistication will determine the time and cost involved. At the very least, your team must have expertise in database design, web technologies, and software programming with a minimum of nine months for development and testing.

Use tools embedded in a learning content management system (LCMS). Several commercial LCMSs incorporate collaborative storyboarding features. However, most LCMSs lack flexible authoring and deployment capabilities because they focus on managing content after it has been developed.

Try a new on-demand application. As web technologies advance, new on-demand application services go mainstream. For example, XStream Software offers the XStream RapidShareStoryboard platform, a web-based visual storyboarding environment with fully integrated group authoring, management, and collaboration capabilities.

To be sure, traditional methods of developing e-learning force team members to overcome numerous hurdles. Collaborative solutions eliminate hurdles and capture the finest contribution each has to offer. Invest the time to explore your options today and reap the benefits of true collaboration tomorrow. Your e-learning team is at the top of its game. Nothing should hold it back from realizing its full potential.