TM1: Digital Interactive media

Breakdown, storyboard and timing

The third and maybe most unknown way of organising content when we are preparing complex mostly asynchronous on-line media like e-learning.

Content organisation for self-study is a special „mix” of traditional content organisation with time and action planning. There are two schools here:

Storyboarding screen by screen like in films (see references below)
Templating the material and giving time indications to it.

Storyboarding is better when e-learning is media rich, (graphics, animations, interactive tasks). Templating is better when e-learning is more text driven. The details of storyboarding for e-learning can be found below.

Templating for e-learning starts with the objective driven break-down of content. But after that, or paralelly, based on training needs analysis, the structure and time barriers have to be planned and the modular structure as well. So finally we have to prepare:

Course template: Course time (for example: 20 hours), Modular structure (for example: linear), tools of the course
Module template: Module time (for example: 4 hours), module internal structure (for example: consisting of 4-6 units), module objectives, module evaluation, specific tools for the module.
Unit template: Unit time (for example 30 minutes), lesson internal structure: prior knowledge, problem to be solved, learning objectives, topics approach, activity types, evaluation, summary, etc.

Based on the template among many other tasks (like designing test and selecting media for different topics and activities) there is a big task to organise the broken down content into this template structure. When all the content is organised, and the templates are filled in, e-learning production may start by writing the material itself.