e-Learning Masterclass

16 Oct e-Learning Masterclass

I attended the e-Learning Network’s ‘The Whole Show’ last week. The single day event was designed to take the participants through the complete online instructional design process from defining learning objectives to actually building an e-learning module. The first half of the day up up until lunchtime each ‘team’ developed a storyboard for their particular learning programme. Before lunch the designers and developers were briefed and in the following three hours they slaved away in a valiant attempt to turn the storyboard into a working programme.  Each team of developers worked with a different authoring tool – one brave lone developer worked directly in Flash. At the end of the day it was impressive to see how much had been done – but as far as the tools go my vote was with Content Point from Atlantic Link – they had achieved the most in the short amount of time available.

It became clear during the day that there are widely varying opinions on how to go about creating a storyboard framework. There was even less agreement on what tools could be used – most people seemed to be happy with Word. I’m a big fan of PowerPoint (or similar) but the I’ve used this tool for lots of tasks that require easy control of visuals (everything from mind maps to web site visualisations).  Since then I have been searching for a specialised storyboarding tool but have yet to find anything better than good old PowerPoint.

All in all though a useful and pretty fun day excellently facilitated by  Clive Shepherd (Clive writes a great e-learning blog), Phil Green, Robin Hoyle (ebc),  Howard Hills, and Bryan Hopkins.