When’s the last time you heard a good story? It was probably more recent than you think. In truth not a day goes by when we don’t encounter a story in some form or another: on the radio on the way to the office, overhearing the woman on the subway complain about the rude grocery store clerk, reading your favorite newspaper, or even the joke a co-worker tells you on the way to the break room.
Stories are such a part of our lives that sometimes we take them for granted. We don’t recognize the power they have to change our lives — but they do. So why not harness this powerful tool in our online courseware?
As instructional designers and developers, our biggest challenges when we develop e-Learning content are to engage our learners in the content, to keep them engaged, and to facilitate knowledge transfer to the job. One effective way to meet all three challenges is to infuse the elements of storytelling in our e-Learning courseware.
Why use stories?
Using stories benefits our courseware in many ways. First, stories are engaging. We all know that occasionally our content can be dry and it’s up to us to make it interesting for the learner. Presenting the content in the form of a story or supplementing content with examples and anecdotes is one more tool in our Instructional Design arsenal that we can use to combat the page-turner effect.
Second, stories help retention. Learners are then more likely to remember content if they can relate it to something in their own lives. Stories can help us make that connection. However, it’s not enough that they remember the story. They must tie the story to their performance. Whenever we use a story in our courseware we must be diligent that the story has a purpose in the course and that it ties directly to our learning objectives. Stories for mere entertainment need not apply.
Take a look at the example in Figure 1 from a course on customer service on the telephone. This section is illustrating the point that as a customer service representative your attitude on the phone makes all the difference.
Figure 1 Using a story in a customer service course
The learners can relate to these examples in their own lives — we’ve all dealt with rude customer service representatives. We know how much we appreciate it when we talk to one who is genuinely trying to be helpful. These examples help illustrate the point, engage the learners in the content, and help them relate it to their own experiences.
Stories fulfill a basic human need. They help us make sense of the world around us, whether it’s a Native American legend explaining how the earth was created, a local news story about an event in our town, or a child’s picture book explaining to a toddler how to use good manners — we need stories.
How do you use stories?
There are several types of stories found in e-Learning to accommodate a range of content, budgets, and timelines.
Examples, scenarios, and anecdotes
Using examples is an effective way to bring story into a course and to engage the learner. Examples illustrate in descriptive and concrete terms the desired behavior you are teaching. Using examples of desired behavior and “non-examples” of undesirable behavior gives the learner something concrete to hold on to and something that they can easily relate to their own situation. The presentation possibilities are endless from the standard “let’s look at an example” to testimonials to scripted vignettes.
The example in Figure 2 uses a dialog between an interviewer and a job candidate to help illustrate how to get the candidate to share specific details about a situation.
Figure 2 Story as dialog
The scripted vignette approach works well here because it gives the learner a model to go from. It lets them see how another interviewer was able to elicit the specific details they will be striving for when they are the interviewer. As you can see, your examples don’t have to be long in order to be effective in telling a story and engaging the learner.
The examples in Figures 3 and 4 use a testimonial approach. The purpose of this course is to create buy-in for a process that executives at an aeronautics company wanted to implement company-wide. Here, we’re using a testimonial approach to address some of the concerns of those resistant to the process and to show some of the benefits of the process.
Figure 3 A testimonial used to support buy-in
Figure 4 Another testimonial used in an e-Learning course
These are just two of several testimonials in the course. In each testimonial, the character is meant to represent actual employees of the company. This adds to the credibility of the example and brings the course to life.
Scenario-based questions and practices
Scenario-based questions are created around a scenario or story to test the learner’s knowledge of content. They can be as simple or as complex as the content and the budget allow.
Let’s say you are writing a course on proper phone etiquette. You’ve explained the basic things that every employee should cover each time they take a complaint from a customer and you’ve given examples and non-examples. Now you can use any number of scenario-based questions to test the learner’s recall. You can present two situations and ask the learner to identify the correct process to test recognition. You can start a story and then ask the learner to identify the next step to test the learner’s recall. You can begin a story and ask the learner to type a dialog of what to say next to allow the learner to begin to apply the skills they have just learned. Make sure you include a model dialog in your elaboration feedback so that the learner can compare their answer.
Figure 5 is a scenario based question from a course on respecting diversity.
Figure 5 Scenario-based question
Each option then has its own specific elaboration feedback, shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6 Elaboration feedback for Figure 5
Scenario-based questions can also be used effectively in more formal assessments. Look at Figure 7 for an example of a test question.
Figure 7 Scenario-based test question for assessment
Even though this question represents a test question, using a scenario mimics the challenges that the learner will encounter in their real-life job and this method further facilitates learning transfer.
Case studies
Case studies are extended examples. They can extend over several lessons with reoccurring characters and situations. Case studies are useful to elaborate extended skill sets or processes — they can take a learner through a series of challenges in a process within a familiar context.
Simulations
Simulations are the ultimate use of story in a course and every instructional designer’s dream to work on. They are used to immerse a learner in a situation and ask them to apply the skills or knowledge they just learned in a risk-free environment. In a simulation, learners explore right and wrong courses of action and learn from their mistakes. The story here is usually much more complex, the characters more developed, and they take a good deal of time to design and write.
Whatever form of story you use in your courseware, the bottom line is that the story must be used for learning. It’s not enough to just create a memorable story. If a learner cannot remember or apply the skills they’ve just learned, then the story and the course are a failure.
How do you write a good story?
So how do you write a good story? And a good story that fits with your learning objective? While many instructional designers consider themselves writers, few think of themselves as “creative writers.” Don’t worry about that. Whether you’ve written the great American novel, or even planned to, is irrelevant. All that is really necessary to write an effective e-Learning story is knowledge of your content, target audience, objectives, and a little imagination.
When you break it down, there are four basic building blocks of any story:
- Triggering Event
- Plot
- Characters
- Setting
The type of story you are using and the learning objectives for that story will determine how much of each of these things you need. Let’s take a look at each one.
Triggering event
The triggering event is always the first and most essential element in any story. It’s the mechanism that starts the story off — the problem — and it’s used to set up the context of the story. Sometimes it’s actually part of the story and sometimes it’s part of the background of the story.
For example, Your most valuable sales person just quit and you have to find her replacement is a triggering event. From this event your story can take several different paths. This triggering event sets up the context or the background for the rest of the story. Many times you don’t even have to think about your triggering event, it is embedded in the skill you need to teach — it is the problem you are striving to correct.
Some other examples:
- Your firm just landed a huge account and one of your main players is departing on family leave.
- Your company’s best sales person just got an offer he couldn’t refuse, and it’s your job to find a suitable replacement.
- An irate customer who has been sent the wrong product for the second time calls and asks for you.
Practical tips
Ask yourself four basic questions:
- What is the problem that this lesson is supposed to address?
- What is the learning objective for this course?
- Who is my audience for this course?
- What details about this event will make it familiar to learners and their real-world situation?
Answering these questions will usually give you the basis for your triggering event.
Plot
Coming up with a plot can seem like an insurmountable obstacle to some writers. More than one writer has spent many a long night staring at a blinking cursor trying to come up with the perfect plot. Some critics and writers say that there are no new stories in the world — just variations on the same plot. If you’ve ever read more than one romance novel, for example, you quickly see that most follow the same basic story line.
Whether or not you agree with this theory on a philosophical level, we can use it to our advantage as instructional designers. You can use the same basic scenario or plot over and over to illustrate a point. The things that change in a story are setting (time and place), characters, and the details. The plots of stories are all around us — we just have to fill in the right details to our audience and our situation.
We have two other things on our side too: triggering events and objectives. Once you have a triggering event you have a starting point for any story. Your learning objectives should then indicate the direction your plot should go. So let’s take an example from our triggering event list: Your firm just landed a huge account and one of your main players is departing on family leave.
Your plot could go several ways, depending on your goals. If your learning objective is on project management, then the plot of your story might be about reallocating the proper resources and reworking the time line. If your objective is on team building, then the plot of your story might focus on how to help the team adjust to a new team member and how to get them up to speed. If the objective is about customer/client relations, then the plot might focus on easing the transition with the client.
Basic plots have five main components:
- The situation or problem
- Rising action
- Decision point
- Action
- Outcome
The situation or problem tells why you are telling the story in the first place — for our purposes this is usually our triggering event. The rising action is where most of the story occurs. This is where our characters are introduced, the problem and details are realized, and where we build to decision point.
The decision point is where the character is forced to take one course of action or another. In e-Learning the decision point is directly tied to your learning objectives. The desired course of action reinforces the objective and goal of the course — the behaviors that we want the learner to demonstrate on the job. The wrong course of action shows the consequences of the wrong behavior. As instructional designers we need to make sure that every possible action is realistic or the story will lose all credibility. Likewise we should strive to make all of our stories as real world as possible to facilitate knowledge transfer. The action then, is what the character or learner decides to do at the decision point. You may include reasons or rationalizations about the course of action in your story or you may just describe the action and its consequences.
The outcome (or resolution) provides the closure for the story.
The level of complexity of your plot will depend on the kind of story you are writing. Obviously, if you’re trying to write a full-blown simulation with multiple realistic success and failure paths your plot is going to be much more complex than if you’re writing a scenario-based question.
Keep in mind, when you are writing a plot for an e-Learning story, that most plots aren’t perfect in the first draft. Most writers start with a basic plot and refine it through a process of revisions. This will be especially true if you are writing more complex story forms like case studies or simulations. Remember this when you’re planning your budget too — if you base your pricing on a metric like the number of screens or words, you also need to think about the complexity of the content of those screens. Creating a realistic and compelling story will usually take more time to write than something like a bulleted list of points to remember. It will also produce better results.
Practical tips
Outline your basic components. Start by listing the five basic components of your plot: triggering event, rising action, decision point, action, and resolution. Use this as an outline you can fill out as you go. You can also use a story brainstorming worksheet similar to the one seen in Figure 8.
Figure 8 Story brainstorming worksheet
Storyboard your plot. Draw out each piece of the plot in comic strip fashion. Drawing pieces of the plot is a strategy used by many creative writers because drawing accesses different parts of the brain and allows you to think about the plot in a different way. It also allows you to think about different details that should be in the story in the form of setting. Share this “storyboard” with your media designers to help communicate the message you want to get across with the story.
Characters
Characters can sometimes be tricky, especially for short pieces. In creating your characters you must give your learner a good sense of the character but do so without sliding into stereotypes. I’ll tell you a quick story. I was writing an online course for an aeronautics company. I positioned the learner as a novice being introduced to a technical process. Through the course, the learner met three experts who talked about the importance of using the process and guided the novice through it. The experts were all employees of the company and as realistic as possible. One of the characters was a woman. Since I didn’t know any female engineers and had never been on-site with the company, I was struggling to figure out what she should be like.
I did, however, have access to one of their internal newsletters with photos of employees in it — so I picked out one of the women’s pictures, the one who I thought most closely represented the other women I saw in the journal, and decided she would be my female engineer. I created a character worksheet for her and in the physical description I wrote: blonde, thin, schoolmarm-like, thick glasses. I use the Character Worksheet (see Figure 9) frequently as an internal document when creating courses — the client never sees it. It’s for the writer and the graphic artists to get a sense of who they are writing about and how to visually represent them.
Figure 9 Character worksheet
As a writer, I was really more interested in the engineer’s background in her job and her personality characteristics than in her appearance. As soon as my Project Manager saw my description, however, she shot me an email reminding me to not be so stereotypical! It was a real wake up call for me and reminded me to be more careful when creating characters so as not to offend part of my target audience.
Using archetypes, on the other hand, can be very effective in helping you work out your characters. In literature, archetypes are often used: the hero, the villain, the goddess, and the innocent. In e-Learning courseware we more commonly see archetypes like the novice, the expert, the mentor, or the skeptic. Once you have a framework for your character’s purpose in the story it will be easier to fill in the details of who that character really is.
Practical tips
Create a character worksheet/sketch. Briefly describe your character’s attributes. Include things like: Name, Age, Ethnicity, Physical Description, Likes, Dislikes, Work Ethic, Mannerisms, etc. You can list these or create a narrative describing the characters more in depth. Share this sketch with your media designer to help them get a feel for the characters as well.
100 characteristics. If you are creating a character for a case study or a simulation and need to create an in-depth character, a fun exercise is to create a list of 100 characteristics. Remember that your goal is to list 100 separate characteristics. List everything from physical description, to favorite word or expression, to astrological sign. You’ll find that around 50 characteristics you’ll really have to dig deep for more of them and you’ll create a character with lots of personality. Again, share this list with your media designers.
Setting
The importance of the setting and how prominent a part it will play will depend on whether you are creating a custom or a generic course and the client preferences. For instance, some clients will want the setting to be as realistic as possible, even to the extent of doing a photo shoot on-site at one of their facilities. For other clients, a more generic approach is acceptable.
From a writing perspective, the setting is your backdrop but because most e-Learning courses have visual media present in some form or another, you won’t need to spend a lot of time writing descriptions of the setting. You will, however, have to work carefully with your media designers to create the right visual environment. Again look to your target audience and your learning objectives to help you figure out your setting.
Practical tips
Draw a picture of the setting. Make an illustration of the setting. Again, drawing allows you to think about the setting in a different way. Include details you would see in the scene. Challenge yourself to draw something representing all five senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight.
Visit the setting and create a description. Start where you are or go to a place that represents the typical setting for your content. If your setting is a corporate office with cubicles and business casual dress code, go there and start to describe what you see. If it is a retail setting, visit some local stores and write down notes about what you see and hear. Listen to the conversations you hear between customers and store associates and use them in your story.
Some rules of the road
Just keep writing. The more you write the better you will get at it. Talk to any creative writer and they will tell you that they have written lots and lots of garbage. Most have journals, filing cabinets, or CD-ROMs full of writing that they wouldn’t show their dog, let alone another human being. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t have the greatest example of effective delivery of peer-to-peer feedback ever written on the first try. It will come.
Another little secret that creative writers will let you in on is that “writing” is 10% writing and 90% revision. Once you understand and accept that fact, you and everyone around you will be much happier and more productive. That being said, don’t go too far the other way and find yourself revising a two-paragraph example for the fifteenth time. Strive for perfection, but know when to say “when.”
“Show, Don’t Tell” is the mantra of all writing teachers. Many novice writers end up telling the readers what to think or feel, instead of writing so that the readers — or in our case, learners — feel for themselves. For example, the sentence “Lois was feeling anxious” is telling the learner how Lois was feeling. Showing, on the other hand, lets the learners come to that conclusion themselves. Instead try something like, “No matter how hard she tried, Lois couldn’t sit still at her desk. She flipped back and forth from her email to the presentation slides, desperately hoping for some distraction or some moment of brilliance to take over for her.” This shows how Lois was feeling and is much more effective in engaging the reader. Often times first drafts are full of “tellings,” use your revision time to change those “tellings” into “showings.”
Don’t be afraid of the details. Many writers are afraid that if they write using too many specifics their audience will not understand what they are talking about. Consequently, their writing ends up very generic and a little on the bland side. A few well-placed specific details will help your writing come alive to a learner and make them feel like they are part of the story.
For example, the sentence “The broken overhead light flickered annoyingly making it difficult for Andrea to concentrate,” is pretty descriptive, but it lacks specific detail. If we revised it and added a couple of specific details as in this example: “Under the intermittent buzz of a failing florescent light, Andrea stared at her monitor with squinted eyes and pursed lips, determined to finish the proposal.” We’ve created a sense of mood and setting, and added interest.
Try to use just enough details to keep the story engaging and interesting without losing your learner in too much detail. A good rule of thumb is to make sure that each detail has a reason and a purpose in the story — related to the objectives.
More practical tips
Brain Dump. Do you think you don’t have anything to say about a subject? Or are you so distracted by other things that you need to do that you’re having trouble concentrating on writing a story? Try this exercise called “Brain Dump.” Set aside 10 minutes and write down everything that comes to mind — everything you want to say or think you might want to include in the story. This is often called stream-of-consciousness writing. If you find yourself thinking about all the things you have to do after work or what you need at the grocery store, write those down too. The purpose of this exercise is to get all of the “junk” out of your head so that you can concentrate on what you want to get across. Whatever happens during those 10 minutes, keep writing. Most of the time you’ll find yourself writing far beyond the 10 minutes and you’ll have gotten through all the unimportant stuff in your head. You’ll find yourself in a better frame of mind to write about the subject at hand.
Littering-the-table. Littering the table is just a slightly different spin on the brain dump. Use this when you have so many ideas on what to write that you’re not sure where to begin. Again, set aside 10 minutes and write down all of your ideas about the story. They don’t have to make sense right now, and they don’t have to go in any particular order. Just write down all those details you want to make sure you include in the story: the objectives, bits of dialog, and details from the scene, etc. Again you are using stream-of-consciousness writing. After you’ve completed the writing, you’ll usually find that you have many of the building blocks you need and now you just need to put them in order. Review this against the learning objectives and your audience profile to determine what to keep and what to toss. This helps to keep it realistic for the learner without drowning them in irrelevant details.
Journaling. Remember when we said that the more you write the better you get at it? Journaling will help you get in the practice of writing more and more. Setting aside 5 or 10 minutes to journal each day, or a couple of times a week, will help you improve your skills. You can make it part of your morning routine right between getting coffee and checking your email. Keep a small book or notepad at your desk or use any one of the many online journal applications to keep yourself in the practice of writing.
Conclusion
Finally, learn to think like a writer. When I was in grad school for writing I learned to think of everything I did as fuel for potential writing — walking down the street, getting coffee at the corner coffee shop, or eavesdropping on a conversation between two people on the bus. I would think about how I could describe the interaction in writing and then many times I would go home and write about it. Your everyday life can be a valuable story source in your courseware. It may be just a case of tweaking the right details. The resources in Sidebar 1, below, may also be helpful to you.
If you’d like to further your creative writing skills the writing section of any bookstore has many books on writing and creative writing exercises. Here are a few of the “must haves” on my library shelf: Exercises
- Writing Down the Bones, Freeing the Writer Within, by Natalie Goldberg
- Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott
- What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter
- The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron Writers on writing
- The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard
- On Writing, by Stephen King
- One Writers Beginnings, by Eudora Welty Style
- The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White Online creative writing resources There is a wealth of resources online for interested writers:
- www.writing.com — An online writing community
- www.writersdigest.com — Online component of Writer’s Digest magazine full of reviews, resources, and exercises
- www.writerswrite.com — An online magazine for writers and readers.
- www.scbwi.org — The Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. The site is aimed at children’s authors but it still has some great resources.
Using stories in your courseware writing doesn’t have to be hard. The more you do it, the more you’ll find opportunities to do it. Stories can add a lot to a course by increasing learner retention and engagement in the content.
