Plan a course before you build it. Six e-learning templates for a team without an instructional designer: a screen-by-screen storyboard, a course outline, a narration script, a video shot list, a knowledge check blueprint, and a review sign-off sheet. Editable Word files, downloaded directly, with no email form in the way.
My first attempt at an online course for my own team was a 40-minute screen recording of me talking. I built it in one sitting and felt efficient. Two weeks later nobody could find the one part they needed, our billing screen changed, and fixing 90 seconds in the middle meant re-recording the whole thing.
The second attempt started with a document. Eight screens, one block each: what is on the screen, what I say, what the learner does, where they go next. It took a morning to write and an afternoon to build, and when the billing screen changed again I edited one block and refilmed one shot.
That document is a storyboard, and it is the single biggest difference between a course you can maintain and a recording you quietly stop using. There are six templates here: the storyboard itself, a course outline, a narration script, a video shot list, a knowledge check blueprint, and a review sign-off sheet. Each downloads as an editable Word document, free and without an email.
TL;DR
An e-learning storyboard is a screen-by-screen plan for a course: what the learner sees, hears, and does on each screen, written before anything gets built. Download six free templates as DOCX, covering the storyboard, course outline, narration script, video shot list, knowledge check, and review sign-off. Plan the screens first and you build the course once.
What an E-Learning Storyboard Is
An e-learning storyboard is a screen-by-screen plan for an online course, written before you open an authoring tool. Each screen gets a block recording what the learner sees, what they hear, what they do, and where they go next.
The name comes from film, and the logic is the same: settle the sequence while it is still words on a page. A storyboard is the version of your course that a subject matter expert can read in twenty minutes and mark up in red pen, which is not true of a built module with animation and recorded audio in it.
It is also the handoff document. If somebody else assembles the course, the storyboard is what you give them, and everything they need to make a decision has to be in it. That is why the fields feel fussy: the alt text, the caption source, the branching, the asset status. Each one is a question the builder would otherwise have to come back and ask you.
What Goes on a Storyboard Screen
Four blocks cover a screen: what the learner sees, what they hear, what they do, and what the builder needs to assemble it. If any one of the four is blank, the screen is not finished, whatever it looks like on paper.
What the learner sees
A headline and short body text
The visual, screenshot, or clip, and whether it exists yet
Nothing that repeats the narration word for word
What the learner hears
The narration written as spoken lines
A word count and a timing estimate
Pronunciation notes for names and acronyms
What the learner does
The interaction type and the prompt
Feedback for a right answer and for a wrong one
How many attempts, and where a wrong answer sends them
What the builder needs
The objective this screen serves
Next screen and any branching
Alt text, caption source, and keyboard notes
Status, from draft through tested
The block people skip is the third one. It is easy to write on-screen text and narration for twenty screens and never once decide what the learner actually does, and the result is a video with a next button. The fourth block is the one that saves arguments later, because it captures the decisions a builder would otherwise guess at.
Format is a smaller question than it looks. A storyboard works as a document, as a slide deck with the notes field carrying the narration, or as a spreadsheet with one row per screen. What matters is that all four blocks are present and that one file is the current version.
Format
What it fits
What you give up
Document, one block per screen
Courses with real narration, a reviewer who reads rather than clicks, anything a second person will build
A quick visual sense of pacing across the whole course
Slide deck, one slide per screen with narration in the notes
Short courses, visual-heavy modules, teams already living in slides
Room for interaction detail and branching, which get squeezed into the notes field
Spreadsheet, one row per screen
Long compliance courses, many screens, tracking build status across a team
Readable narration, since long text in a cell is hard to review and harder to read aloud
Which Template Should You Use?
Start with the course outline, move to the storyboard, and add the others as the course needs them. The narration script matters once you are recording audio, the shot list once you are capturing screens, the knowledge check once there is an assessment, and the sign-off sheet before anything goes live.
E-Learning Storyboard
One block per screen
The core document. For every screen: what is on it, what the narrator says, what the learner does, where they go next, and the alt text and caption source. Plus a screen index you hand to whoever builds it.
Course Outline
Before the storyboard
Audience, the problem the course fixes, objectives written as actions, a module map with screens and minutes, the assessment plan, and a build schedule. Fill this in first or the storyboard drifts.
Narration Script
What gets recorded
The spoken lines screen by screen, with a pronunciation list, word counts, timing estimates, delivery notes, and a recording checklist. The same file becomes your caption source.
Video and Screencast Shot List
Before you hit record
Shot by shot: what is on screen, which clicks happen, the narration cue, and the seconds. Includes a pre-record setup list and a retake log, so a software change means refilming one shot.
Knowledge Check Blueprint
Questions that map to objectives
A coverage map tying every objective to at least one question, full question blocks with feedback for right and wrong answers, and a quality check that catches the usual guessable questions.
Review and Sign-Off Sheet
Before it goes live
Four reviews on one page: content, instructional, accessibility, and compliance, with a defect log, signatures, a publish date, and the date of the next scheduled review.
Match the Template to Where You Are
Deciding what the course is for: Course Outline. Planning the screens: Storyboard. Recording a voice track: Narration Script. Capturing software or a demo: Video and Screencast Shot List. Writing the assessment: Knowledge Check Blueprint. Getting it approved and published: Review and Sign-Off Sheet. For a first course, the outline and the storyboard alone will get you further than any authoring tool. The first course most small teams build is new hire onboarding, which is also the one that repays the planning fastest, because every hire takes it. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR, so until it arrives, keep anything candidate-facing, such as a role preview you send before an offer, with the hiring materials rather than inside the onboarding course.
6 Free E-Learning Templates
Download all six together or take the ones you need. Each is a complete working document with the prompts already written. Delete the sections that do not apply to your course rather than leaving them blank in a file you hand to someone else.
Download All 6 E-Learning Templates
Storyboard, course outline, narration script, shot list, knowledge check, and review sign-off. All as DOCX files in one download.
Template 1: E-Learning Storyboard (Screen by Screen)
Two full screen blocks plus a screen index. Each block covers the visual, the narration with a timing estimate, the interaction and its feedback, the navigation, the accessibility notes, and a build status. Copy the block for every screen in the module.
NOTE: This is a sample template provided for general information only. Copy the
screen block above for screens 3 and up. Keep the screen numbers in the index
matching the blocks, because the index is what you hand to whoever builds it.
Template 2: E-Learning Course Outline and Module Map
The one-page plan that comes before the storyboard: audience, the problem the course fixes, objectives written as actions, a module map with screens and minutes, the assessment plan, and a build schedule with a review date. Pair it with a learning path if the course is one step in a longer sequence.
E-Learning Course Outline and Module Map
[Company Name]
E-LEARNING COURSE OUTLINE
Course title:
Owner: __ Version: ______ Date: _____
Audience (roles): ____
The problem this course exists to fix:
_
_
What changes on the job when it works. Write something a manager could observe:
_
Prerequisites:
Delivery: [ ] Self-paced [ ] Live virtual [ ] Blended [ ] On the job
Required: [ ] Yes, for: __ [ ] Optional
Renewal: [ ] None [ ] Annual [ ] Other: _____
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Write each one as something the learner will do, not something they will know.
Start every line with a verb someone can watch.
1. By the end of this course, the learner will be able to ______
2. By the end of this course, the learner will be able to ______
3. By the end of this course, the learner will be able to ______
4. By the end of this course, the learner will be able to ______
Cut any objective you cannot write a question about.
MODULE MAP
Module Title Objectives Screens Minutes Check
1. ______ ___ _
2. ______ ___ _
3. ______ ___ _
4. ______ ___ _
5. ______ ___ _
Total seat time: ______ minutes
Longest single module: ______ minutes
ASSESSMENT PLAN
Knowledge check after each module: [ ] Y [ ] N
Final assessment: [ ] Y [ ] N Passing score: ______%
Attempts allowed: ______ On failure: ______
Recorded for each learner: [ ] Completion date [ ] Score [ ] Course version
[ ] Signed acknowledgment
CONTENT SOURCES
Existing material to reuse (SOPs, policies, checklists, recordings, screenshots):
_
_
Subject matter expert: __
Hours needed from them: ______ Booked for: _____
BUILD PLAN
Outline approved: _____ Storyboard drafted: _____
Expert review: _____ Build: _____
Test on a phone: _____ Launch: _____
Next scheduled review: _____
Triggers an early review: policy change, tool or screen change, incident,
regulation update, a question the course keeps failing to answer.
NOTE: This is a sample template provided for general information only. Fill in
the outline before the storyboard. Every screen you storyboard later has to
point back to an objective on this page.
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The spoken lines screen by screen, with a pronunciation list for names and acronyms, word counts, timing estimates, delivery notes, and a recording checklist. The finished script doubles as the caption source.
Narration and Voiceover Script
[Company Name]
NARRATION SCRIPT
Course: __ Module: __
Written by: __ Recorded by: __
Version: ______ Date: _____
Target pace: about 150 words per minute. Read every line out loud before you
record it. If it is hard to say, it will be hard to hear.
PRONUNCIATION AND TERMS
Term, name, or acronym Say it as Notes
_ ______
_ ______
_ ______
_ ______
SCRIPT
SCREEN 1 [ _ ]
On screen (short, and not the same words as the narration):
[ ] Same microphone, same distance, same settings for every take
[ ] One audio file per screen, named Course_Module_Screen##
[ ] Script saved as the caption source, not retyped from the finished audio
[ ] Total runtime checked against the storyboard estimate
[ ] Anything you improvised while recording written back into this script
NOTE: This is a sample template provided for general information only. Keep the
script and the finished audio in the same folder as the storyboard. When the
course changes next year, the script is what you edit first.
Template 4: Video and Screencast Shot List
Shot by shot: what is on screen, which clicks happen, the narration cue, and the seconds. Includes the pre-record setup list that keeps a customer name out of your demo, plus a retake log.
Video and Screencast Shot List
[Company Name]
VIDEO AND SCREENCAST SHOT LIST
Course: __ Module: __
Recorded by: __ Date: _____
Capture: [ ] Screen [ ] Camera [ ] Both
Resolution: _____ Frame rate: _____
BEFORE YOU HIT RECORD
[ ] Demo account ready, with sample data that is not a real person or customer
[ ] Zoom level set so text is readable on a phone screen
[ ] Cursor highlighting on if the clicks are the point
[ ] Narration script open next to the shot list
[ ] One practice run all the way through
SHOTS
Shot What is on screen Action or clicks Cue Seconds
1. ______ ____
2. ______ ____
3. ______ ____
4. ______ ____
5. ______ ____
6. ______ ____
7. ______ ____
8. ______ ____
Total runtime: ______ seconds
RETAKES AND DEFECTS
Shot What went wrong Refilmed on
_____ __ _____
_____ __ _____
_____ __ _____
AFTER RECORDING
[ ] Captions generated and corrected against the narration script
[ ] Transcript saved with the course files
[ ] Audio description written for anything shown but never said out loud
[ ] Sensitive or personal data checked frame by frame and removed
[ ] File named and stored at: _____
[ ] Storyboard screen numbers updated to match the final cut
NOTE: This is a sample template provided for general information only. Record
short shots rather than one long take. A 20-second shot is quick to refilm
when the software changes; a 12-minute walkthrough is not.
Template 5: Knowledge Check and Assessment Blueprint
A coverage map tying every objective to at least one question, full question blocks with feedback for right and wrong answers, and a quality check that catches guessable questions.
Knowledge Check and Assessment Blueprint
[Company Name]
KNOWLEDGE CHECK BLUEPRINT
Course: __ Module: __
Author: __ Version: ______ Date: _____
Passing score: ______% Attempts allowed: ______
Randomize question order: [ ] Y [ ] N
On failure: [ ] Repeat the module [ ] Conversation with the manager
[ ] Retake after ______ days
COVERAGE MAP
Every objective needs at least one question. Any question that maps to no
[ ] The question asks about doing the job, not about remembering a screen
[ ] No option is correct simply because it is the longest one
[ ] No all of the above, and no none of the above
[ ] Wrong options are mistakes people on this team actually make
[ ] Feedback teaches the point instead of only saying the answer was wrong
[ ] A person who already does the job well would pass without taking the course
[ ] A person who has never done the job would not pass by guessing
NOTE: This is a sample template provided for general information only. If a
course is required to satisfy a regulation, check what that standard says about
scores, retakes, and what has to be recorded before you set the rules above.
Template 6: Course Review and Sign-Off Sheet
Four reviews on one page: content, instructional, accessibility, and compliance, with a defect log, signatures, a publish date, and the next scheduled review. For required training, pair it with the training records that prove completion.
Course Review and Sign-Off Sheet
[Company Name]
COURSE REVIEW AND SIGN-OFF
Course: __ Version: ______
Storyboard author: __ Review date: _____
Replaces version: ______
CONTENT REVIEW (subject matter expert)
[ ] Every step matches how the work is actually done today
[ ] Screens of any software match the current version of that software
[ ] Nothing contradicts a current policy, SOP, or handbook section
[ ] Names, titles, and contacts in the course are current
Reviewer: __ Signature: _ Date: _
INSTRUCTIONAL REVIEW
[ ] Every module maps to at least one objective, and every objective is covered
[ ] Narration and on-screen text do not repeat each other word for word
[ ] Every module has an interaction or a knowledge check
[ ] Seat time matches the estimate on the outline
[ ] The course opens with why it matters, not with a list of the modules
Reviewer: __ Signature: _ Date: _
ACCESSIBILITY REVIEW
[ ] Captions present on every video and corrected, not raw automatic output
[ ] Transcript available for audio and video content
[ ] Alt text on every meaningful image, and decorative images marked as such
[ ] Color is never the only way meaning is carried
[ ] The whole course can be operated with a keyboard alone
[ ] Audio description or an equivalent for anything shown but never spoken
[ ] Checked once on a phone at the smallest screen size your team uses
Reviewer: __ Signature: _ Date: _
COMPLIANCE REVIEW (required training only)
Standard or requirement this course exists to satisfy: __
[ ] Content matches what that standard requires
[ ] Completion record captures the learner, the date, and the course version
[ ] Retention period for the record confirmed: _____
Reviewer: __ Signature: _ Date: _
DEFECT LOG
# Screen What is wrong Owner Fixed
1. __ ____ _
2. __ ____ _
3. __ ____ _
4. __ ____ _
APPROVAL TO PUBLISH
Approved by: __ Title: __
Signature: __ Date: _____
Publish date: _____ Assigned to: __
Next scheduled review: _____
Retire the previous version on: _____
NOTE: This is a sample template provided for general information only and is not
legal advice. For training that satisfies a legal or regulatory requirement,
confirm the recordkeeping rules that apply to your industry and your state.
How to Storyboard a Course
Storyboarding runs in six steps, and the order matters more than the tooling. Decide what changes on the job, turn that into objectives and modules, gather what exists, write the screens, read them out loud, then review and sign off before anything gets built.
1
Name the change you want on the job
Write one sentence describing what someone will do differently afterward, in terms a manager could watch. If that sentence will not come, the course is not ready to plan, and what you actually need is a conversation with the person doing the work.
2
Turn the change into objectives and a module map
Write three to five objectives as actions, group them into modules, and give each module a screen count and a minutes estimate. This is the whole course outline, and it takes about half an hour.
3
Collect what already exists
Pull the SOPs, handbook sections, checklists, screenshots, and recordings you already have. A first course is mostly assembly, and starting from a blank page when a written procedure already exists is wasted effort.
4
Write the screens: see, hear, do
Fill in a block per screen with the on-screen text, the narration, the interaction and its feedback, the navigation, and the accessibility notes. Leave the wording rough on the first pass and get all the screens down.
5
Read it out loud and time it
Read every narration line aloud, count the words, and convert to seconds. Anything you stumble over gets cut. Add the seconds up and compare the total against the minutes you promised on the module map.
6
Review, sign off, then build
Run the four checks on the sign-off sheet, log the defects, collect the signatures, and only then open the authoring tool. Every fix caught here is a fix you are not paying for twice.
Steps two and five are the ones people drop, and they are the two that keep a course honest. The module map stops a 12-minute course from quietly becoming 40 minutes, and reading aloud catches the sentences that look fine written and land badly spoken.
Time Is the Obstacle, Not Attention Span
Gallup reports that 41% of employees name time away from their responsibilities as their biggest obstacle to development, and that fewer than half of U.S. employees, 45%, took part in training or education to build new skills for their current job in 2024 (Gallup). A 45-minute module is not competing with a shorter one. It is competing with a shift that has to be covered, which is why the minutes column on the module map is worth defending.
The other reason to plan in a document is that a screen note has to be specific enough for somebody else to build from. The difference is easy to see side by side.
Screen
Note nobody can build from
Spec a builder can use
Opening
Welcome screen, company intro.
Title, who the course is for, seat time of 12 minutes, and one line on why it matters. Narration 20 seconds. No interaction. Next: screen 2.
Policy rule
Explain the expense policy.
On screen: the three spending limits as a short list. Narration explains why the receipt rule exists. Interaction: click each limit to reveal a real example. Next: screen 5.
Software demo
Show them how to submit a request.
Screencast, 45 seconds, demo account, submitting one time-off request from the dashboard. Cursor highlighting on. Captions taken from the narration script. Next: practice screen.
Practice
Add a quiz here.
Scenario: a receipt is missing for a team lunch. Four options, one correct. Wrong-answer feedback names the rule and returns the learner to screen 5.
Safety step
Cover the lockout procedure.
Diagram of the six steps with numbered callouts. Alt text describing the sequence in order. Narration walks each step. Knowledge check on the order of steps.
Wrap-up
Summary and thanks.
Three lines restating the objectives, the name of the person to ask, and where the written procedure lives. Completion recorded with date and course version.
Writing Narration and On-Screen Text
Narration and on-screen text should carry different words, not the same ones. Put the short version on screen, the full explanation in the audio, and let the captions handle anyone who needs the spoken words as text.
This is the correction that improves a self-built course most, and it is counterintuitive. Dartmouth's summary of Richard Mayer's principles of multimedia learning states it directly: people learn better using on-screen graphics with voiceover, and graphics, voiceover, and on-screen text together can be overwhelming (Dartmouth). Two of the other principles shape the storyboard just as much: segmenting, that people learn better from user-paced segments than one continuous unit, and coherence, that leaving extraneous content out beats putting it in.
Practically, that means the storyboard has a word budget. I plan narration at about 150 words per minute, which is an unhurried recorded pace, so a 90-word screen runs roughly 36 seconds. Writing the count on the block turns pacing into arithmetic instead of a feeling, and it exposes the screen that has quietly grown into a lecture.
Read every line aloud before it goes to review. Written prose that has never been spoken is full of clauses nobody can say in one breath, and you will hear it immediately. This is also where the pronunciation list earns its place: the product names, the acronyms, and the surnames that a narrator, or you in six months, will otherwise guess at.
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Accessibility belongs in the storyboard block, not in a cleanup pass after the build. Alt text, the caption source, and a flag for anything shown but never spoken take seconds to write per screen and hours to retrofit across a finished course.
Federal Section 508 guidance is the clearest free specification of what accessible course media has to include. For prerecorded video with audio it calls for captions synchronized to the corresponding audio, plus audio description for the important visual detail the soundtrack never states out loud. A transcript is the equivalent for material that is audio only or video only, such as a podcast or a silent animation. The guidance also makes the point that saves the most time in practice: plan for captioning as you develop the video, and use speaker scripts and other text-based materials you already have in your captioning process (Section508.gov). In storyboard terms, that means the narration script becomes the caption source instead of something you transcribe back off the finished cut.
Those rules bind federal agencies and their vendors rather than every small business, but they are the standard worth building to anyway, and two of them cost nothing at the storyboard stage. If the narration script is written first, the captions are already done. If the alt text is on the screen block, the person building the course does not have to invent a description for a diagram they did not draw.
Two more habits catch most of what is left. Never let color alone carry meaning, because a red box and a green box read as the same box to a learner who cannot tell them apart, so add a label or an icon. And check that the course can be operated with a keyboard alone before you publish it, which takes five minutes and finds every interaction that only responds to a mouse.
Four Storyboarding Mistakes
These four turn up in almost every first course, and each one costs a rebuild rather than a rewrite.
Storyboarding inside the authoring tool
Building while you plan feels faster for about an hour. Then the expert reads it, three screens turn out to be wrong, and every fix means touching animations, timing, and audio you already recorded. Changing a line in a document costs seconds. Changing the same line in a built module costs a re-record and a re-publish. Plan in the document, get it signed off, and let the build be a transcription job.
Narration and on-screen text saying the same words
The most common self-taught mistake is writing a paragraph on the slide and then reading it aloud. It feels thorough and it works against the learner, who now has to reconcile two versions of the same sentence arriving at different speeds. Put the short version on screen, the full explanation in the narration, and let the captions carry the spoken words for anyone who needs them in text.
Objectives written as topics
An objective that reads understand the expense policy cannot be storyboarded, because nothing tells you what a screen should make the learner do. Rewrite it as an action someone can watch: submit an expense report with a compliant receipt attached. Now the screens follow by themselves, and so do the questions, because you can ask about the action directly.
Screens with nothing to do on them
If the interaction line on every screen says click to continue, you have written a video with extra steps. That is fine for a two-minute policy update and wasteful for anything a person has to be able to do afterward. Aim for something to do in every module, and make it a decision from real work rather than a quiz on the sentence you just said.
The thread through all four is the same: they all move a cheap decision into an expensive place. Fixing a sentence in a document is free. Fixing the same sentence in a published module means a re-record, a re-export, and telling everyone who already took it that they need to take it again.
E-Learning Templates for a Small Business
A large company has an instructional designer, a media team, and a review board. A small business has one person who knows the job and one person who can put a course together, and they are often the same person. Here is where that gap actually bites.
Storyboard templates assume an instructional design team you do not have
Most templates you can find are built for a studio: a producer, a designer, a voice artist, and a review board, spread across a document with forty columns. In a small business the storyboard author, the expert, the narrator, and the reviewer are the same two people, and the whole course has to fit into the gaps in a normal week. These six templates are sized for that. The storyboard block asks for the four things a builder cannot work without, the outline fits on one page, and the sign-off sheet replaces a review board with four checklists and two signatures.
The course lives in one person’s head, and that person is busy
The hardest part of a first course is not software, it is getting the knowledge out of the one employee who has done the job for six years. Sitting them in front of a blank authoring tool produces nothing. A storyboard turns the same conversation into a structured interview: here are the eight screens, tell me what goes on each one, and correct anything I got wrong. I book two 45-minute sessions, fill in the draft between them, and the expert only ever has to react to something rather than create it. Their time is the scarce resource, so spend it on review, not on production.
Building the course is half the job; assigning it and proving it happened is the other half
A finished module sitting in a folder trains nobody. Somebody has to assign it, chase the people who have not finished, and keep a record of who completed which version and when, which is exactly the part that falls apart when it lives in a spreadsheet and an inbox. This is the side FirstHR handles: the onboarding workflow assigns the course as a task with a due date, the new hire takes it through the self-service portal alongside their paperwork, and completion lands on the employee profile with the date attached. Hiring and the first week are one handoff. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR, so the day-one course can be queued the moment an offer is accepted rather than assembled by hand on a Monday morning. FirstHR is an onboarding and HR platform, not a payroll provider, and it does not build course content for you.
If you are weighing whether to buy a platform for this at all, the honest answer is that a first course does not need one. Two documents, a screen recorder, and somewhere to store the file will carry you through your first three courses, and only then is it worth reading about small business learning platforms. The planning habit is the part that transfers; the tool is replaceable.
Build, Assign, and Record
A finished storyboard is a course nobody has taken yet. What turns it into training is the routine after the build: assign it to named people with a due date, record who completed which version and when, and set a date to review it before it goes stale.
Build from the approved file
Once the storyboard is signed off, building is assembly. Do not redesign screens in the tool, and write any change you make back into the storyboard the same day.
Assign it to real people
A course with no due date and no owner gets taken by the people who least needed it. Assign it as a task, set the date, and say what happens if it slips.
Record the completion
Keep the learner, the date, the score if there is one, and the course version. Version matters: proving someone took the old module is not the same as proving they took the current one.
Review on a date, not on a feeling
Put the next review date on the sign-off sheet and treat a policy change, a software update, or an incident as an early trigger.
Self-Paced Does Not Mean Unpaid
Time an employee spends on required training is generally working time. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act regulations, training attendance can be excluded only when all four conditions hold: it is outside regular working hours, attendance is voluntary, the course is not directly related to the employee's job, and the employee does no productive work during it (29 CFR 785.27). A required module a nonexempt employee finishes at home fails at least two of those. Multiply seat time by headcount at the outline stage, because it is a real payroll cost. This is general information, not legal advice.
The templates above work on their own, and for a first course a folder and a shared drive are enough. To run the assignment side without chasing people, FirstHR gives the course a due date as a task, lets people take it through the self-service portal, and stores completion on the employee profile with the date and the version.
New hire training is part of onboarding rather than a separate exercise, so the day-one course sits in the same workflow as the paperwork and the e-signatures. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR, which will close the gap between an accepted offer and an assigned first-week course. For required training, keep the signed compliance records too. FirstHR is an onboarding and HR platform, not a payroll provider, and it does not author course content for you.
Key Takeaways
An e-learning storyboard plans every screen before the build: what the learner sees, hears, does, and where they go next.
Write the course outline first, because a screen that serves no objective is easy to spot and cheap to cut on paper.
Keep narration and on-screen text different; the same words in both places work against the learner.
Put alt text, the caption source, and audio description flags on the screen block, not in a cleanup pass after the build.
Give every module a minutes estimate and defend it, since time away from the job is the obstacle employees name most.
Sign off content, instruction, accessibility, and compliance before publishing, and record who completed which course version.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an e-learning storyboard?
An e-learning storyboard is a screen-by-screen plan for an online course, written before anything is built. Each screen block records four things: what the learner sees, what the learner hears, what the learner does, and where they go next. Most versions also carry the objective that screen serves, the media that has to be created or found, and the accessibility notes, meaning alt text for images and where the captions will come from. It is the same idea as a storyboard for a film, adapted for a course, and its purpose is to let the expensive people argue about the content while it is still cheap to change. Once a module is built, every correction costs a re-record and a re-publish, so the storyboard is where the arguing belongs.
What should an e-learning storyboard include?
Four blocks per screen, plus an index. The visual block covers the headline, the short on-screen text, and the image, screenshot, or clip, along with whether that asset exists yet. The audio block holds the narration written as spoken lines, its word count, and a timing estimate. The interaction block names what the learner does, the prompt, and the feedback for a right and a wrong answer. The builder block carries the objective the screen serves, the next screen and any branching, the alt text and caption source, and a status field. The index at the end lists every screen with its type, its seconds, and its status, and it is the page you hand to whoever assembles the course. Anything beyond those four blocks tends to slow the writing down without improving the build.
What is the difference between a storyboard and a course outline?
Scope. The outline is the plan for the whole course and fits on one page: the audience, the problem the course exists to fix, the objectives written as actions, a module map with rough screen counts and minutes, and the assessment plan. The storyboard is the plan for each individual screen inside those modules. Write the outline first and get it agreed, because it is the cheapest document to change and it decides what the course is for. The storyboard then has something to point back to, and a screen that serves no objective on the outline is easy to spot and cut. Doing it the other way around produces a beautifully specified course that trains people on the wrong thing.
Do you need a storyboard for a short course?
For a five-screen policy update, an outline and a script are usually enough. The storyboard earns its keep as soon as three conditions appear: someone other than the author will build or review it, there is video or narration to record, or the course has to be repeated for every new hire. Any one of those makes rework expensive, and rework is what a storyboard prevents. The other honest test is whether a subject matter expert has to sign off. Reviewing a document takes them twenty minutes and reviewing a built module takes an afternoon, plus a second afternoon from you fixing what they found. Below that bar, skip the storyboard and write the narration script instead.
How long should an e-learning module be?
Short enough that someone can finish it between other tasks, which in practice means single-digit minutes per module rather than one long course. Gallup found that 41% of employees name time away from their responsibilities as their biggest obstacle to development, and a 45-minute module is the version of a course that never gets started. Research on multimedia learning points the same way: people learn better from user-paced segments than from one continuous unit. The module map on the course outline is where you enforce this. Give every module a minutes estimate, add them up, and if a single module runs long, split it at the point where the learner does something rather than at a convenient slide.
How do you make an e-learning course accessible?
Plan it on the storyboard rather than retrofitting it after the build. Every screen block should carry alt text for meaningful images, a note on where captions come from, and a flag for anything shown on screen but never said out loud, which is what audio description covers. Federal Section 508 guidance is the clearest free specification: captions synchronized to the audio for prerecorded video, audio description for important visual detail the soundtrack never states, and a transcript for anything that is audio only or video only. It also advises planning for captioning as the video is developed and using speaker scripts and other text-based materials you already have in the captioning process, which in practice means the narration script becomes the caption source instead of something you transcribe back off the finished cut. Two more habits catch most of the rest: never carry meaning by color alone, and check that the whole course can be operated with a keyboard.
Do you have to pay employees for time spent on e-learning?
Usually yes. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act regulations, time spent at lectures, meetings, and training programs counts as working time unless all four conditions are met: attendance is outside regular working hours, attendance is genuinely voluntary, the course is not directly related to the employee’s job, and the employee does no productive work during it. A required compliance module a nonexempt employee finishes at home in the evening fails at least two of those, so the time is paid. This matters at the planning stage, because seat time multiplied by headcount is a real payroll cost that belongs on the course outline next to the minutes estimate. This is general information, not legal advice, and state rules can add requirements.
