The other day I was watching reruns of the original Star Trek TV series (yes, I admit it) and those familiar words of the crew’s mission rang once again – Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

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A month ago, Connie Malamed posted a discussion in LinkedIn inviting readers to donate storyboard formats to be offered as a resource to the eLearning fraternity. Many have offered the formats they were using. You can find them at the eLearning coach. I too sent a couple of them (yet to be uploaded; Connie is a terribly busy person but still finds time to maintain an extremely useful site for learning professionals like us).

That started my thinking about this fairly “low-tech” component in a high tech world of technology-based learning and corporate training. I was amazed to discover that our ubiquitous storyboard is actually an 80-year old Ancient . The humble word document that serves us in developing eLearning courseware has an interesting history. According to Wikipedia, the first storyboard was developed at the Walt Disney studio during the early 1930s for the 1933 Disney’s Three Little Pigs! I also learnt that it is used in many ways by many professions – Film, Theater, Advertising, TV, Publishing, Business, eLearning…

We at CommLab use MS Word to make our storyboards. PowerPoint is also used by some and Authoring tools by a few. But I think ‘MS Word’ is by far the most extensively used in developing online course storyboards. Connie has a very useful section, “Storyboards for eLearning” on her site for those who wish to pick up some tips.

I wonder if we can give the ol’ storyboard a ‘makeover? Can we come up with a tool that offers all the following.

• Desktop Publishing software like Ventura or PageMaker to build a tailor-made formats with ease
• PowerPoint to create some elementary animation
• Clip Art Gallery for images / photographs
• Various Assessment Components that can just be selected and populated
• Audio / Video Gallery of music, standard instructions, video clips…
• Dictionary and Thesaurus

Any more ideas?

Thank you for reading my blog. I look forward to your comments.

RK Prasad

CEO

We started Elearning Edge on June 2, 2009 (four months to date) with a purpose of making it a one-stop platform of ready-to-use resources for learning professionals.

Our experience in the elearning industry for the last 9 years has resulted in a large accumulation of useful resources like assessment components, templates, online courses, ILT courseware, PowerPoint decks, webinars, graphic components – everything and anything that will help learning professionals.

It is really gratifying to see that the membership has crossed 1000 in just four months. I am taking this opportunity to thank all the members for joining us.

I would also like to ask what resources you would want to help you succeed in your jobs and make your working life easier.

What else can we do to make this group, eLearning Edge the largest eLearning group on LinkedIn?

Share your views!

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