Storytelling in eLearning: The Why and How

Whether you design classroom training, eLearning, m-learning, or work with another medium entirely, storytelling is a learning tool that possesses the power to motivate, persuade, educate, and even entertain. This article describes how learning theory supports storytelling, how to craft a story, and ways to design stories into eLearning lessons.

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5 Ways to Tell Stories in eLearning

Training professionals promote storytelling as a way to engage learners and relay tacit knowledge. Although storytelling is a skill that many inherently possess, instructional designers often struggle to incorporate stories into eLearning lessons. This article describes five approaches to designing a story into eLearning.

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Conveying Tacit Knowledge in eLearning

Tacit knowledge – concepts we understand intuitively but struggle to explicitly articulate – is often difficult to clearly outline in training. However, instructional design techniques such as storytelling and social learning can help convey and reinforce these concepts. This article explains tacit knowledge and describes techniques for conveying it in an eLearning environment.

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George Orwell’s Advice for Writing eLearning Content

Learners can be fickle, quickly slipping into distraction or boredom if asked to read too much. Thus, instructional designers have a responsibility to write training materials as clearly and concisely as possible. This article explains George Orwell’s six tips for communicating in “plain English,” applying his principles to eLearning design.

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Announcement: Blog Post on Storytelling Makes List of Top April Posts from eLearning Learning

I just found out that an article I wrote in April, A Formula for Storytelling in eLearning, made the list of top April posts on the eLearning Learning site (scroll down to #21)! Yippee!

eLearning Learning describes itself as a community that collects and organizes the best information on the web about eLearning. Last year, the site collected nearly 9,000 web articles related to eLearning.

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Writing to Educate and Entertain: What Would Stephen King Do?

Most instructional designers I know are decent technical writers, but many are not as adept at creative writing. However, to keep learners motivated during an eLearning course, designers should apply the techniques of creative writing and technical communication to learning theory’s best practices. This article, inspired from a literature review recently published in Performance Improvement Journal, theorizes about what techniques an accomplished fiction author like Stephen King might apply when writing for eLearning.

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Visual Storytelling: Lessons from Slide:ology

A graphic can be an effective way to illustrate a concept, summarize data, or create a focal point within a sea of text. This is true for magazines, presentations, eLearning – just about any communication tool, really. Slide:ology, a book by Nancy Duarte, offers an inspiring and informative crash course on visual design. This articles summarizes lessons learned from the book and points out how its principles do (and sometimes don’t) apply to eLearning design.

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A Formula for Storytelling in eLearning

Storytelling is a hot topic in the field of instructional design. This article lists ways to use stories in training and outlines the elements of a good story.

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Use Scenarios to Make Quiz Questions Relevant to the Job

Instead of just presenting information in training and then prompting learners to apply it afterward, why not make an entire lesson into a story? Introduce new concepts in the context of the story…instead of introducing concepts in a decontextualized way and bringing examples in later.

This type of thing can work with quizzes too. The story might not be as fluid and involved in a quiz, but even using basic scenarios seems to make quiz questions more relevant. And learning theories out there support this approach. I used my latest contribution to the Integrated Learnings: eLearning blog to describe my application of scenarios to quizzes.

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