Humans have evolved to learn through stories. Are you stuck on where to start with telling a story that can drive your content? Look no further than the last movie you watched or novel that you read! What made that story successful? What did you remember?

This session will describe how to utilize existing narratives to drive learning journeys. Attend to learn how to identify an appropriate story to adapt based on content, learning outcomes, and your intended audience. We will workshop this concept with participants to further describe how these existing narratives can help to identify opportunities for learner engagement.

This session will clearly describe the importance of stories for training and provide practical tools to engage in developing learning journeys. Sessions at conference discussing writing for instructional design are often well attended as instructional designers often don't see themselves as writers and feel the need to learn more. We propose that training designers don't need to be good writers, they just need to understand how to effectively leverage successful stories and be able to identify what makes them successful. In doing so, they can adapt these narratives to suit their training needs either overtly or covertly resulting in increased learner engagement and clear assessable pathways to measure against training outcomes.

A practical job aid will be distributed to help guide future practice.

Josh Yavelberg, PhD is the CEO of Flying Cloud Solutions, a consulting company focused on assisting organizations with their training strategy, development, and evaluation. Before joining the training world, Josh taught at the Art Institute of Washington for over a decade in many roles but consistently instructing the color theory course as a foundation for all design fields. Josh’s currently enjoys focusing his energy on design thinking, gamification, diffusion of innovations, training engagement, emerging technologies, and communities of practice.