Storyboarding phase

Goals and deliverables

This phase deals with writing the main bodies of content for the courses: texts (called Articles in FutureLearn) and storyboards. These pieces help to connect the other step types and get a better understanding of the course flow. Writing the articles is fairly straighforward, but writing storyboards also includes, thinking about visualisation to support the video narrative, finding speakers or interviewees and planning the recordings with the film crew. In the end we should have a number of finished text steps and recordable storyboards, including one for the course trailer. This phase takes roughly 9 weeks to complete.

Deliverable 3: storyboards

During the Design phase, you have already thought of what kind of videos you would like to have in your course. The third deliverable we are going to work on are the storyboards for those videos. Each video that you want to record needs one to be able to make sure that it is concise, complete and visually supported. Please read the Writing a storyboard document below first and copy the template to write your storyboards. Examples of storyboards can be found below. For advise on how to find images, look here.

Example storyboards

Deliverable 4: Course trailer

The trailer is the sales pitch of the course and should grab people’s attention by being visually  stimulating and focus on why your course is relevant for them. As attention span is short, aim for 1.5  minutes (180 words), with an absolute maximum of 2 minutes (240 words). Any longer and people  will not see the entire thing or even decide not to watch it.  To get an idea, try a few of Groningen's examples below. You can find all University of Groningen's trailers in their MOOC playlist.

The trailer doesn’t need to describe the course in detail – the course description below the  trailer will perform this function.

Questions that should be answered in the trailer:

- What is the course about?

- Who is the course for?

- Why is it interesting to do this course? / What problem does it tackle/help solve?

- What should the learner do in this course?

- What does the learner take away from the course?

- Who are the creating organisations or educators?

With these questions in mind and with the help of examples you may have seen on the Futurelearn  platform and our example storyboards from Social Network Analysis and Improving Your Study Techniques, try and write a storyboard yourself.

A trailer is usually very visually-oriented with an extreme topic/problem focus. This means that we may decide not to show the speaker at all. We have access to a range of native speakers, some even professional narrators to voice your trailer. Take this into consideration when thinking about who is going to do the voice-over or will feature in the trailer.

You can make use of the Storyboard trailer template and Writing a storyboard documents to help you.

Deliverable 5: Writing article steps

An article step is, basically, a piece of text. The goal of the article step is to provide a deeper, more detailed  understanding of the content. An article should not be too long. A  good practice is between 300 and 1000 words, preferably between 500 and 700. Academic articles  from academic journals are therefore inappropriate to copy/paste. A summary of some of the  important parts would be more suitable. It takes some time to write this, so plan to do this early on.  You can use the empty Article step template and Create Article steps help document below.