This is the third year we’ve attended the wonderful TCC (Technolocy, Colleges & Community) virtual conference hosted by the University of Hawaii and Learning Times. We presented for the second time. The 2009 conference theme was: “Collaborative Learning, Social Networking, Technology Tools, and Best Practices.” This year we decided to tell the story of our conversion from one Learning Management System (LMS) to another.
As we were telling a story rather than just steps in a process we wanted to avoid using PowerPoint slides with bullets and graphs. Our story was a pretty interesting one, so we wanted to use the right format to tell it. We decided put our story into comic book/strip format using ToonDoo. After we decided upon the theme and characters for our cartoon, we took the 8 identified steps in our process for changing LMS’s and assigned a few of these segments to each member of the Instructional Design team. In order to tell our story, we needed to pick the right backdrop and them for the comic, and we settled upon the theme of space exploration. Putting the slide show together was very much like designing a storyboard for our process.
Delivering the presentation was fun! Our very own talented Christy Tucker actually lent us her musical talents and played a horn solo of the Star Trek theme to introduce us. We also were able to answer a lot of audience questions about the LMS Conversion process. Looking back a few weeks after the fact, I can say it really felt good to tell our story as the conversion process was a long one full of challenges, but the rewards of our success were well worth the effort.
You can view the presentation slides below.
You can also read the presentation notes for each of the story slides.
Thanks for the compliment on my horn playing. I think it was good to have a more engaging intro to draw people in, especially since by the third day of the conference it’s easy to feel mentally fatigued.
Thinking about the idea of telling stories to engage people, one of the best presentations I attended was on scenario-based learning. I don’t think that a full scenario-based course the way the presenters did it would work as well for us, since our participants bring enough of their own scenarios to the classroom. But we could certainly do more with small scenarios and stories to get people interacting with the content in another way. I don’t think we even have to give them lots of detail; just a short vignette that leaves room for them to interpret is actually pretty effective.