The Subtle Art of Storytelling in Course Design
How to keep your students turning the pages in your online course.
We all have an inclination towards stories. It’s human nature.
Whether it’s a book, a film or a TV show; we can all recount stories that have captured our imaginations, our interests and our hearts. What is it about stories that keeps us so compelled?
Anthropologists have claimed that it’s part of our brain’s evolutionary wiring. For millennia, humans have communicated through stories. Our ancestors told stories to keep us wary and out of danger. As a result, our brains have developed schema that recognise and appeal to stories.
Not only are we attracted by stories, but they can have a powerful impact.
In fact, we tell ourselves stories every day to help us make sense of the world around us. ‘It just wasn’t meant to be.’ Or, ‘everything happens for a reason.’
Let’s look at the phenomenon behind Brene Brown whose TEDx Talk on “The power of vulnerability” has been watched over ten million times and inspired millions of people.
I believe it’s her unique ability to share her research data through personal anecdotes that makes Brown and her research so compelling. She knows data alone can be quite abstract and uninspiring, but data weaved into a narrative gives us context and meaning. That’s why she calls herself a researcher and storyteller.
Stories are a reflection of the human need to seek meaning and understand life. In fact, we tell ourselves stories every day to help us make sense of the world around us. It just wasn’t meant to be. Or, everything happens for a reason. How many of you recall telling this story?
Before becoming a learning designer, I was fascinated with storytelling. I liked the meticulous and sometimes merciless craft involved in composing a good story.
I liken it to a puzzle that you have to piece together—except, there are many ways this puzzle could be put together. You just have to find the most compelling one.
Even the simplest of stories could be elevated by the art in which you put the pieces together and its impact could be powerful.
So, what if we used story and story design techniques to develop an online course?
Even after signing up to your course, people may still lose interest and never finish.
While online learning is taking off around the world, one of the biggest challenges to overcome is student attrition. How do we encourage students to engage and complete a course if they no longer have to be in a physical classroom to do so?
This challenge can be due to individual accountability and an increase in the number of distractions for young people. Even after signing up to your course, people may still lose interest and never finish.
Yet despite these setbacks, I would argue there is still a strong culture of learning— through books, television, films and podcasts. Their intention might not be primarily educational but there is no denying that these stories can have a changing and positive impact — which is what we want from education.
Using narrative to design an engaging course
So, I wanted to find out whether we could design a course like a story to make it more engaging.
In this blog post, I will share my experiment and thought process of using the elements of story and narrative to develop a course on cultivating creativity for professional teachers.
Finding the story
We can look at a story as a telling of an event between a teller and a listener. With so many competing stories out there, this story has to be interesting.
Finding a story worth telling is not always simple. To do this, I had to ask myself a number of questions:
What is it about creativity that makes it a worthwhile subject? How does creativity relate to the world today? What does creativity say about society in general?
This gave me the following questions: Is creativity a product of nature versus nurture? Can anyone develop creativity? How can someone improve their creativity? What do creative people do?
I wrote these questions down as potential plot points for my story.
If I could have a positive impact on this one person then I considered this course a success.
Identifying the audience
Somewhere out there I knew there had to be a teacher who yearned to spice up their teaching practice but didn’t know where to start. He or she simply needed guidance and an incentive to become more creative. This person would be my single reader. If I could have a positive impact on this one person then I considered this course a success.
In writing for this single person, I also found that questions of tone and language tended to naturally sort themselves out as my voice naturally used a language that was encouraging and empowering.
Choosing the learning outcomes
All good stories are able to teach us something. As this was a professional development course for teachers, these outcomes were guided by teacher professional standards.
These became my course learning outcomes and provided an easy direction for my story to go.
…cultivating creativity in the classroom is more than a national obligation. It’s also fundamentally an exercise of courage and risk with its own obstacles.
Framing the story
There are many ways to tell a story. Events could be told in chronological order, or in medias res, starting in the middle of the plot and moving forwards and backwards through flashbacks.
When teaching or learning a new topic, it’s often advantageous to start with the big picture before honing in on the finer details. This allows us to make connections and understand relationships between cause and effect.
For my subject, the importance of creativity carried with it a large mandate to prepare students for an uncertain future. Whilst this is the case for many countries around the world, cultivating creativity in the classroom is more than a national obligation. It’s also fundamentally an exercise of courage and risk with its own obstacles.
I wanted to avoid starting with this premise as there is nothing more demotivating than a chore. So, I needed to frame this story in another way.
Asking questions of the reader
In Malcolm Gladwell’s Masterclass in Writing, he spoke about intentionally starting an article with a puzzle. He used this as an invitation for the readers to apply their own thinking and become participants in the story themselves.
Pixar writer and director Andrew Stanton mentions something similar in his famous TED Talk, The Clues to a Great Story. He called it ‘preparing a meal’ for the audience by giving them two plus two instead of four.
In psychological research, this concept is called “causal bridging inference,” and it can make a story more interesting than if you were to give away all the details. When you create empty spaces in your story, it enables your reader to fill that space with their own stories and interpretation, making it more meaningful and memorable to them.
A story doesn’t have to have all the answers. Often times, the more engaging stories are those that ask questions (sometimes without answers) and provide opportunities for reaction.
To this end, I wanted to treat each page as a chapter in a book where each page confronts the reader with yet another obstacle of creativity to overcome.
Adding tension and conflict
A good story also needs tension and more importantly, conflict, to move the story forward and keep people engaged. Without it, there is no story.
“Conflict is to storytelling what sound is to music” — Robert McKee, world-renowned screenwriting lecturer.
When researching my subject, I found that there was tension in the way people viewed creativity and the way that people responded to it. For some, it was an elusive quality — difficult to achieve — and for others, it was simply a part of who they were. What makes creativity more difficult is that there is no definitive answer for what it means to be creative.
I wanted to maintain this tension and have my reader walk a tightrope between narrow and broad conceptions of creativity and allow them to create their own meaning.
To this end, I wanted to treat each page as a chapter in a book where each page confronts the reader with yet another obstacle of creativity to overcome. Surpassing each page would allow the reader to feel more confident and courageous to become creative in their own way.
The benefit of narrative
Thinking of my subject through a narrative helped me to control the information and data I would present to my students and not the other way around. Oftentimes a subject brings with it so much information that it’s tempting to include it all.
With a narrative, the emphasis was placed on the reader or user experience — how does this information affect the reader? Some details may not have been as relevant, or they detracted from the lesson I ultimately wanted to teach, and so they had to go.
Stories are a powerful medium of communication that we humans instinctively appeal to. Using story to design this course really helped me to think about the student experience from the beginning to the end and create a learning journey that was purposeful and engaging.
I hope this insight encourages you to think more about your students’ experience as a journey and to make it an engaging one.
Happy course design!
