When it comes to instructional design, words are an increasingly devalued currency. Bullet point speak rules the LMS land with dwindling learner attention spans and the advent of text and Twitter speak cited as justification.
But there’s a dark secret to our modern day textual KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) obsession. Students aren’t necessarily reading – or paying more attention – as we write less. Rather, as they become increasingly convinced there’s nothing of value or interest to read, they’re paying even less attention.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m Facebook fans with brevity. And short sentences. But if our goal is to grab learner attention, establish relevance, create confidence and drive satisfaction as motivational experts like Keller have been exhorting us to do for decades, we’ve got it wrong. We don’t need fewer words; we need better, more meaningful words.
And this is where a well-infused narrative can do wonders. So let’s step into the shoes of an undergraduate college student taking a course on multimedia journalism. You’ve been doing fun things like creating podcasts, photo stories and videos, but now you’ve arrived at the decidedly unsexy module on data visualization. 
The very same module that you and your fellow undergrads declared to be of the least interest in your pre-course survey. Now you’ve been tasked with creating a “heat map” (or choropleth) using some software package you’ve never even heard of.
In no specific order, this sounds boring, difficult, meaningless and intimidating. And even the world’s easiest to follow screencast video replete with chirpy voiceover and accompanying pithy printed tutorial ain’t changing that.
But then you encounter this instead (you can just watch the first few minutes to get the idea):
Now, I would like to think there’s some sound instructional design stuff going on here like chunking and scaffolding (not to mention the high-quality Powtooning). But what makes this video fly is the use of narrative. For with our narrative, we’ve got the mechanism to deliver on A(ttention), R(elevance), C(onfidence) and S(atisfaction) and motivate our learners.
On the attention front, we can manufacture conflict and incongruity with our highly externally confident protagonist who completely lacks any necessary skills/understanding relative to the topic at hand. We can play up our hero’s cluelessness and our sentient heat map’s exasperation to humorous effect.
Relative to relevance, we can establish kinship with the likely student mindset with our hero’s dilemma and his need to go from knowing nothing to a finished product in short order.We can also seamlessly work in relatable examples dealing with topics like recent elections and sports.
We also can model the desired heat map creation behavior along the way. This, in turn, allows us to build learner confidence as they vicariously experience the heroic arc of our protagonist. If this “hero” can learn to create a heat map, most certainly the student will think they can too.
And while the idea of being celebrated by your peers and basking in the associated glory of creating an awesome heat map is comically exaggerated, nonetheless, the narrative connects the learner task to a satisfied emotional state. Positive and natural consequences abound.
Now certainly this heroic level of narrative infusion (and execution) is not realistic for all undertakings. But it’s not needed in all undertakings. The learners in this multimedia journalism class didn’t need to be motivated in the same way relative to creating video or photo stories. You need to pick your spots. And then unleash your narrative superpowers for all their worth.
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