If you were unfamiliar with L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz and read a description of the elements of the story, you’d likely see a list something like the following:

• a haunted castle with flying monkeys, a poppy field
• a tornado in Kansas, a village populated by wee folk
• a forest of talking foul-tempered trees
• a cornfield with a sentient scarecrow
• and a yellow brick road (YBR for short).

Virtually There Session Recap

As trainers, we often have to design and deliver technical or hard-to-understand content to our learners. Oftentimes, the content itself doesn’t naturally draw people in or lend itself to being easily remembered. By leveraging new edtech, innovative instructional design techniques, and engaging facilitation, we make an honest effort to engage learners and improve organizational performance.

But what if bells and whistles don’t hold the key to one of our biggest modern learning challenges? Karin Rex, instructional design expert, believes an easier path can get us to our goal of creating last learning experiences: story.

Watch the webcast of Karin’s fantastic Virtually There session Storytelling on Steroids with VideoScribe, for the full story.

Virtually There Recap

Did you know that you have stories constantly running through your subconscious mind? It’s true! Without realizing it, you frame every interaction through narrative, creating underlying bias. Good, bad, or indifferent, your bias influences how you navigate the world.

This fundamental brain biology impacts professional relationships, too. Before every conversation or task, you anticipate how it will unfold.

Have you ever watched The Magic School Bus? What about Bill Nye the Science Guy or Schoolhouse Rock?

These entertaining children's television programs have an important common approach to education: they explain complex subject matter in easy-to-understand ways by using likeable characters in fun narratives.

The childlike wonder you experienced when learning chemistry from Bill Nye can happen in the modern classroom. Regardless of whether your content focuses on technical training or soft skills, incorporating characters into appropriate learning modules can positively impact both learner engagement and retention.

eLearning has been a viable training option for a while now. Thanks to tools like GoAnimate and Camtasia, instructional designers can quickly and easily produce a high-quality learning product. But just because we have access to technical tools, that doesn’t automatically result in a seamless creation process.

As expert Jennifer Hofmann points out:

“Instructional design is still relevant to blended learning. It’s evolving, and it’s mission-critical.”

As a helpful component in many blends, we need to thoughtfully plan out our eLearning modules and connect them to defined learning objectives.

But how?

Virtually There Session Recap

Pixar animator Andrew Stanton said, “The greatest story commandment is: make me care.” Some of the most creative storytelling minds use this mantra when illustrating to increase audience engagement with their films.

Unsurprisingly, this approach can apply in modern learning, as well. How do we get our learners to care about our training programs?

Learning Strategist, Enzo Silva, and his colleague Kate Tronvig provided Virtually There learners with an easy-to-follow process during their popular session, “You May Not Be Walt Disney, But You Can Draw and Animate.”

Watch their session for tips and tricks around using popular eLearning design tools.

Virtually There Session Recap

“Build an eLearning course,” they say. “It’s what you’re great at! You can have it done by Friday.” Sound familiar? eLearning’s popularity as both stand alone instruction and part of a larger blend makes it a standard in many instructional design portfolios. Unfortunately, the “go do that thing you do” mentality reflects a general misunderstanding of the complicated nature of eLearning production.

When faced with such a disconnect, how do we design impactful modules with a limited budget and an overwhelming number of tools available for purchase?

Kevin Thorn, Chief Nuggethead and corporate training expert, provided a helpful framework for building an eLearning design, development, and production toolkit consisting of free and paid tools.

I bet someone read the same book to you over and over again at bedtime when you were young. You loved that story. You knew it by heart. You could see it in your head without the pictures. Sometimes, you put yourself in the place of the main character. You might even have learned something that continues to influence your life to this day.

I bet you still remember that story, so many years later. It was that compelling and meaningful. You connected.

BYTE Session Recap

As we all know, blended learning is all the rage these days! We know that selecting authentic design treatments for each defined learning objective creates the most impactful training experience. While strong instructional design makes a difference for our modern learners, there’s one additional element we can integrate into our programs that further increases the likelihood of learner success: stories!

Speakers Karin Rex and Tom Campbell recently shared their storytelling expertise with BYTE learners. Watch the full program replay for examples of powerful instructional stories in action.

Storytelling has a long history as one of most fundamental communication methods. From paintings on cave walls to Egyptian hieroglyphs, to the first words ever written on papyrus with ink, people have been telling and listening to stories.

We love to HEAR stories, too! As children, we all begged our parents for “one more story!” And many of us remember the morals of those stories even now as adults.

We all enjoy a good story and revere a good storyteller. Whether it’s an engrossing novel, an exciting movie, or a facilitator telling us about the horrible-no-good-rotten-awful experience they endured the very first time they tried to facilitate training in the virtual classroom.