Storyboarding for Branching eLearning

One of the ways to make your elearning more engaging for your learner is to add branching scenarios – giving them the option of making decisions that produce different results. However, storyboarding these elearning scenarios might be difficult without some extra planning.

When writing a branching elearning scenario, the important part is to map out which decisions go to which parts of the course. This could be as simple as a single fork with only two choices, or several nested multiple choices that each have a different result!

If you’re building your elearning storyboard in Powerpoint, there is a useful feature that allows you to link slides to clickable objects! Once you have built out the slides for all the possible outcomes of your scenario, go to a slide where the learner needs to make a decision.

On that slide, create the options for the learner to choose from, and select one of the objects that go to a specific branch slide. Right click on the button and select Hyperlink. Then, from the left sidebar of the popup window, select Place in This Document.

This will give you a listing of all the slides in your elearning storyboard. Select one for a preview of the slide you will be able to link the object to, and select OK. Then when you preview your storyboard, you will be able to go to the linked branch when you select that object on the branching slide! Repeat this for each branching option you have in your storyboard.

Then, test out your interaction by selecting Set Up Slide Show and Browsed at a kiosk, which will disable the regular navigation of clicking to the next slide. Now you can view the your elearning almost as if it were fully programmed!