This week was all about creating a storyboard for my online teaching module. A storyboard is basically a blueprint of an eLearning course and it's used as a way to brainstorm and develop ideas before adding them to a Learning Management System (LMS) environment (Adeboye, 2014). I've taught eLearning courses for the past six years and this is the first time that I have approached designing a course using a storyboard (I'm actually a bit embarrassed to admit that!). It has been incredibly useful as it have allowed me to view my course as a big picture, rather than just plugging in content. I've used the storyboarding process to plan out my pages, assessments, evaluations, and activities. It has allowed me to approach my course design while keeping theories such as community of inquiry (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000), transactional distance (Moore, 1989; Moore, 1991), and cognitive load (Pappas, 2014) in mind. It's definitely been a useful step and I will use storyboarding as I continue planning ANY courses in the future (face-to-face, blended, eLearning).
To complete my storyboard, I used Google Sheets and the template that Rob provided (with some modifications to suit my needs). I included page #, page title, timing, script, media, and resources columns and used a separate sheet for each module (module 1 - getting started and module 2 - chemical nomenclature). I feel like there are both pros and cons to using this tool. In terms of pros, I really like how I can easily see an overall view of my module and how easy it was to make changes such as page order or adding/deleting pages. It also was a great way of examining the types of activities and content that I was including on each page and encouraged me to think about cognitive, teacher, and social presence integration throughout the module. In terms of cons, I found copying content over to my course shell to be finicky as I had to fix all the formatting (line breaks, headings, etc). Overall, Google sheets served its purpose for creating my storyboard, however, I'm not sure I would use it again for storyboarding. I'm wondering if a mindmapping tool, like Mindomo, would work better? Or perhaps just using a table in Google docs?
Here is the link to my Chemistry Bootcamp Storyboard!
References
Adeboye, D. (2014, Oct 21). Principles of Storyboarding for e-Learning design. [YouTube Video]. Available from https://youtu.be/l9PZ2bEuKFAGarrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Available from: http://cde.athabascau.ca/coi_site/documents/Garrison_Anderson_Archer_Critical_Inquiry_model.pdf
Moore, M. (1989). Editorial: Three types of interaction. The American Journal of Distance Education, 3(2), 1-7. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08923648909526659
Moore, M. (1991). Editorial: Distance education theory. The American Journal of Distance Education, 5(3), 1-6. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08923649109526758
Pappas. C. (2014, February 5). Cognitive load theory and instructional design. [Web log post]. eLearning Industry. Available from https://elearningindustry.com/cognitive-load-theory-and-instructional-design
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