How I build
great learning

Huge shoutout to Tim Slade and his eLearning Challenges! When I saw this challenge on his website, I knew it was one I wanted to participate in and try new things with. This was such a fun project to develop because the theme was outside the box and different from what I normally create — it gave me an opportunity to make something with a lot of humor and outlandish situations.

I knew I wanted to build this entire course using Storyline 360 due to the interactions, the inclusion of audio/voiceover, and the graphics I wanted to use. I started by thinking about the learning objectives I wanted to include and how I could tell a story to achieve them.

Once I had my learning objectives, I decided I wanted the format to feel like on-demand training someone might receive from a fictional company. I created the first few slides showing zombies traveling from underground all the way to someone's house — using royalty-free sound effects and Storyline's AI text-to-speech to create a high-quality voiceover narrator.

After completing the introduction and story aspect, I focused on coming up with humorous situations and information that supported my learning objectives. The training strikes a good balance between watching/listening and interacting — clicking through and completing drag-and-drop activities toward the end. The crafting table was incredibly fun and allowed me to use a lot of variables. The knowledge check at the end allows learners to pass and earn "Zombie Survivor" status.

I came up with the idea for this training because I coached tennis prior to getting into instructional design — I wanted to take something I used to do in-person and create an eLearning version of it. This meant I could act as the SME for the course, which made the research phase much faster.

I knew I wanted the course to be completely in Storyline 360 so I could leverage interactions and make the course feel fun for the learner. I decided to use bright green and yellow as my theme colors to give it that tennis feel.

I used Twine to plot out each slide and the order I wanted to build them in. I knew this course wasn't going to be an all-encompassing rules guide — rather, a short, fun introduction to court layout and scoring, which are typically the hardest parts of the sport.

The most fun I had with this build — and the part I think is most learner-centered — is the scoreboard interaction. I used JavaScript/HTML/CSS to build the scoreboard, giving me the ability to have the score react to two buttons being pressed for a player scoring a point. This gives learners both a fun interaction and the ability to see points progress in a game as they see fit.

The coffee eLearning came to fruition after I realized I was terrible at making coffee at home. I decided to solve that problem through a training, since it wasn't possible I was the only person having this issue.

I began by researching different types of coffee and brewing methods — and quickly realized the amount of information on brewing a cup of coffee could fill libraries. So I narrowed it down to just three methods and created something simpler: a microlearning experience that someone could easily go through and learn a thing or two about brewing a great cup at home.

I began with storyboarding and branching out different slides/scenes in Twine to keep everything organized and make the build phase faster. From there, I needed to find stock photos for each brewing process and background images — this was fairly time consuming, as I wanted high-quality images that also allowed for interactivity within Storyline.

Creating the labeled graphics, slider interactions, and drag and drop were the most technical parts of this build — but after completing one brewing branch all the way through, the remaining paths came together much more quickly.