Introduction – Storytelling in Digital Learning
I realised recently that I’ve been using storytelling in my learning and teaching development for as long as I can remember; it seems to have been something I found as a natural extension of my focus on practical examples, relatable material and case studies.
I have always tried to provide learners with learning experiences that reflect their situations and speak to their lived experiences. The first online learning materials I worked on at Victim Support back in 2013 were aimed at volunteers from two different services. I decided to specifically work on case examples relevant to each service and allow the user to choose which one they wanted to experience. This allowed both for authentic stories to be told about the work they were likely to do, and for assessments to be created that addressed actual practice points and what a learner would do, given a specific situation. I also made the stories visual and personal by creating graphic representations of the characters involved.
Stories are how we relate to each other, the world, and our place in it; humans are natural storytellers, and stories serve to:
- Provoke an emotional response
- Create a sense of flow to pull people through narrative
- Illustrate versions of the future, consequences or models of behaviour
Stories are both memorable and actionable (Greene 2020) – they let us see the context in abstract situations, and provide examples of practice (whether that be what to do or what not to do). From a learning theory perspective, stories promote sense-making and reflection, aiding learners’ construction of new knowledge (Baldwin and Ching 2017).
Here, I’m going to explore my development process using examples from two recent projects – ‘Simon’s Searching Saga’, and Esira’s dilemmas from the ‘Plagiarism and Copyright in the Academic Context’ tutorial.
Planning and developing stories
When identifying where stories have a place in a teaching and learning plan I find it useful to look for scenarios that can pose different challenges and potential solutions or options for a central character. A good candidate will often explore multiple possibilities, and pose questions we can use to make the story interactive. It will often also take a perspective that can be assumed by the student, whether that be themselves as they are now as students, or whether it be their future selves as professionals in the workforce.
As an example, the following is an extract from a very preliminary tutorial plan to teach students about open access research for our library. A small part of the plan called for a focus on situations students were likely to face in accessing reference material. At this point, I brought up the idea of creating an interactive story to explore these challenges. I felt that this would both be more engaging, but also be more effective at getting across the utility of open access material by providing very practical, relatable examples and dilemmas. I had the librarian I was working with develop a basic outline to identify the overall context and some problems the student might face; from this, I wrote a short premise from which to develop the story. This was a very small overview at this point. You can see these in the tabbed area below:
Initial notes
Focus on examples relevant to students (after mention incentive for authors of broader access):
Reproducibility crisis
Broader impact
Equity of access to quality research (tie to library budgets, having to request loans or no copies to access, mention impact of 2020 pandemic to access)
More developed outline
- Context: student has an essay and is looking for research on the topic
- Part 1: problems accessing articles
- Character can’t access article they want
- Library can order it for them but… (Issues – costs of access)
- Cost of ordering
- (student is aware of fact library already pays a large amount for subscriptions)
- Delay in receiving because can’t access straight away
- Tries contacting authors, but… (Issues – long term loss of access)
- One has moved to a new institution and is on research leave
- One is dead
- Find another, older article by the same author; the journal has never been made available online, and they can only find three libraries in the UK which hold a copy in print).
- Added context – those libraries are currently closed / not lending due to global pandemic
- Their friend at another university can access (Issues – Equity of access, re-use permissions)
- They could provide a copy, but notice it is watermarked with when they accessed it and aren’t sure if they should share it or not
- Library can order it for them but… (Issues – costs of access)
- Character can’t access article they want
- Part 2: Character now has the article, but the article doesn’t include some of the data and they want to be able to include some of that in a table or graph in their essay
- Alude to replication crisis in science (news headlines) (Issues – Research integrity)
- Character wishes data was available
- Part 3: Character has done their essay and their lecturer is really impressed – they want to work with the student to write and publish a journal articles on the topic.
- Student wants to share a copy with their relation who provides adult education classes
- Briefly touch options an author faces… open access or not, how to make open access, copyright and permissions for sharing….
- Student wants to share a copy with their relation who provides adult education classes
Simon, an undergraduate history student, is involved in a local history project that involves writing a literature review on the theory and practice of oral history-taking and its ethical issues, before conducting an oral history interview with a participant. He has come across some references to papers that sound very relevant to his subject material, but is having problems finding copies that he can access.
At this point, I move development from basic text formats to my preferred visual planning tool, Whimsical. Whimsical is unique in allowing you to combine multiple different types of planning document, for example you can have a text document that also contains a mind map, or a sticky note planning grid. I find it very flexible, easy for new users to grasp when I’m collaborating, and the ability to add things like icons to a mind map means I can use it to tick off sections I’ve completed, or identify different parts of the plan. It’s also shareable, and you can set it to be editable by non-logged in users, so anyone can easily take part in a planning session. I have tried developing in various stand-alone mind mapping tools and Microsoft Word, but the integration of this tool makes for a smoother experience.
Character development
Once I have a basic story premise that provides me with a very rough guide as to who the character should be, I can start developing a more rounded character. The first step is to identify the actions that the character needs to take in the story, and their motivations — what do they want to get out of the situation they’re in, and what do they want to avoid at all costs. This can be very simple, depending on the scale and complexity of the story involved. A very simple one might have just two columns; one for actions, and one for motivations. A more complex story might require multiple characters with their own separate actions, conflicting motivations and numerous interactions between them.
Here, you can compare the simpler character development for Simon’s story, and the same process for the Copyright & Plagiarism project, which involved a much more complex storyline with a lot of character interaction:
Story development
The next stage is planning the story itself. Here, you need to list your main plot points, and all the times when the character needs to make a decision to change the direction of the action. For a non-interactive story, these could be the places where you might break up the narrative to ask learners for their reflections, or what they would do in the same situation. For an interactive story, these are also your interaction points.
Branching stories can quickly get complex, especially if you build in loops to return learners to certain places, or have different end points. For the ‘Simon’s Searching Saga’ story, after mapping the story, I wanted a quick and easy way to test the story flow out, and write the narrative; for this, I used a piece of free software, Inky – this let me make a navigable HTML version using a simple scripting language to share with the subject expert, and to spot any errors in the flow of the story.
# theme: light
# title: Simon's Searching Saga
# author: James Bisset & Nicola Fern
->Beginning
==Beginning==
DONE
Simon is searching for articles and isn’t having much luck - he comes across some that seem okay, but they don’t seem to be very trustworthy. He finds one article that looks ideal, but can’t access the article.
What do you think Simon should do to access this article?
+ [Ask the university library if they can order the article.] ->Order
+ [Pay the required fee] ->Pay_Fee
== Order ==
# CLEAR
DONE
Simon fills in the library request form. The confirmation screen notes that it may take 7-10 days to receive a copy, if it can be sourced, and all requests are subject to budget constraints
+ [Wait] ->wait
== wait ==
# CLEAR
DONE
Two weeks later, Simon is getting desperate, this article seems to be really important to him from the abstract...He talks to his friend Salma, who goes to another university. She checks and she can access the article! She’s looking at it on her screen. What should Simon do here?
+ [Ask Salma to send him the article] ->Article_From_Salma
+ [Contact the library again] -> Contact_Library
== Contact_Library ==
# CLEAR
DONE
Simon contacts the Library who checks the status of the request.
Most requests are fulfilled within 48 hours (25% of requests in 2020/21), and 78% of requests (in 2020/21) were fulfilled within 7 days.
Unfortunately in this instance, the supplying library has indicated they cannot supply a copy of this article.
Simon is concerned now - he really wants to see a copy of this article. What's the best action for him now?
+ [Ask Salma for a copy of the article] ->Article_From_Salma
+ [Take a look at who else he can contact] ->Contact_SomeoneIn this case, I also created a far simpler version of the map that mirrored the expected Storyline structure, splitting it into different project scenes.
I am usually quite ambitious in terms of what I want to achieve, and I often find that my initial plans don’t survive first contact with my main enemy (time!). Because of this, I like to plan things flexibly – aim high, but with the ability to revise down in complexity or fidelity if necessary. With this project, as it progressed I came to the conclusion that it would be impractical to create video for every slide point, and that some sections were more suited to staged interactions, e.g. to allow people to read content, making it more user-paced. I subsequently selected some scenes to be animated, and some to be static and image/timeline based. This made the project more manageable within a reasonable timescale, and resulted in added levels of interactivity.
For a non-interactive story, this process is simpler – requiring a story premise that can be fleshed into a script. The Copyright and Plagiarism course was simpler in structure in that it was a linearly told story, but episodic in nature, meaning that there were still multiple stories to draft and script.
Product design and development
Storytelling can be used in digital education in a variety of ways, for example:
- as a purely textual case study
- as a textual case study, with some visual elements
- as video (live action) or animation
- as an audio scenario
- as a linked series of stories to form a larger narrative or developing series of events
- as an interactive story in the style of ‘choose your own adventure’ books
- as an immersive experience in the case of virtual reality or augmented reality
I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to go about this; in my view, this choice is governed by considerations such as the overall importance of the story to the learning as a whole, the time available, the skill level of the person developing it, and the way it will be presented to the learner. A text-only narrative can be absorbing as a jumping off point for group work exploring scenarios, reflecting on practice points or identifying problems. Live action videos can be especially effective for analysing communication cues, interactions between people or specific behaviours. One project I have worked on previously that used this medium is Gateway-C, a web site focused on teaching GPs about cancer to promote early diagnosis and improve patient experience through use of filmed case studies interspersed with readings, activities and interviews with clinical experts.
Examples
Here are some examples of ways I have incorporated some of these development methods in the past.
Text- and image-only
This example is from a course I worked on with the university Counselling Service in 2020. Their goal was to improve the accessibility, interactivity and effectiveness of some training they had already developed with an external agency.
My main role on this project was to review the existing material, and identify where improvements could be made, then make those improvements. One of the things I enhanced was their use of text-based scenarios.
The first example image shows how I integrated a community-written JavaScript extension to the Rise course after publishing, providing a way for learners to respond to open-ended questions without the need to use Storyline blocks.
The second image shows how I created small graphic scenarios, using the carousel block to navigate between them. A combination of ALT text and image captions keeps this interaction accessible.
Video
The video shown here was produced as part of my educational video production module during my Master’s in Digital Technology, Communication & Education. It was made in collaboration with the LGBT Foundation to illustrate the process of getting a rapid HIV test.
I introduced a character-led story to show the tension some people feel about getting tested, and address some of the myths about the process.
The video was shot by myself and my colleague at the time, Tom Addison, and directed and edited by me. My friend Genevieve and staff from the LGBT Foundation played the on-screen characters.
Animation
This video is one of the ones I produced for the ‘Plagiarism and Copyright in the Academic Context’ tutorial for Durham University library.
It’s part of a series of seven videos that tells the story of Esira I. Galp, PhD student. She faces a succession of challenges on the way to giving her first big-stage conference presentation, from run-ins with her supervisor, dodgy data problems, and near-miss attribution issues. In the Rise course, these integrate with the overall programme, and are used in conjunction with follow-up questions based on her scenarios.
This was such a fun project and through it, I developed 3D modelling and animation skills using Blender, an open source application.
Interactive story
As discussed earlier, this interactive story forms part of the Open Research tutorial created with Durham University Library.
It uses Articulate Storyline for its ability to quickly and easily create branching scenes and timeline based interactions.
Story use for academic teaching
I am currently writing a workshop for delivery in June 2022 as part of DCAD’s Post-Graduate Certificate in Academic Practice. The workshops form a required part of students’ participation in the course, and they are expected to complete a reflective practice assignment after the workshop.
The workshop descriptor document, including the learning objectives and UK-PSF alignment, can be downloaded below. The pre-workshop activities can be viewed on Whimsical.
Nic will be delivering a workshop on Digital Storytelling as part of our PGCAP programme. This workshop is aligned to the UKPSF and enables participants to gain Fellowship of the HEA. Nic is a fantastic teacher, with a really clear and inclusive teaching style. Nic is well researched in her practice and always reflective, trying to understand how she can be a better teacher, and better understand her specialist interests.
Rachelle O’Brien, Senior Digital Learning Designer, Durham University
References and reading
Baldwin, Sally, and Yu-Hui Ching. 2017. “Interactive Storytelling: Opportunities for Online Course Design.” TechTrends 61 (2): 179–86.
Greene, Rance. 2020. Instructional Story Design. Alexandria, Virginia, USA: ATD Press.
Hart, Jack. 2021. Storycraft, Second Edition: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction. University of Chicago Press.
Lupton, Ellen. 2017. Design Is Storytelling. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Storr, Will. 2020. The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better. Abrams.