Microlearning can be effective in training employees. Yet, before the learning team goes off by themselves and spends the budget adding content, teams can use an iterative approach to test their ideas and concepts with the client or sponsor in rough form first.

Markdown or AsciiDoc can be used to create quick drafts/prototypes of content before all the expense is put into making the next level of detailed prototype with rapid learning development tools.

For example, I will show the asciidoc content of the storyboard. It is just a text file called storyboard.adoc. This prototype can be made really fast with just text and used to get feedback from the client/sponsor. It can be edited with any text editor like a phone, notepad++, Atom, etc, meaning it can be versioned to track the client/sponsor interactions and rolled back if necessary to an earlier version.

The text-based storyboard is quickly updated and copied to other tools as the next iteration of prototype development occurs.

You might wonder, "Why not just use MS Word for this storyboard?" Well, because Word embeds the images you may want to use in the rapid development tool. Word also adds cruft to the HTML that may require clean up before the copy/paste content can be used in the next iteration prototype.

For example, AsciiDoctor ^[1] turns this source…​

into this draft. The rendered view looks better than just plain text, but no time was spent adding formatting for just a storyboard prototype. This saves time and money for the learning development team.

You can structure your storyboard however you like to fit your context.

Although not many rapid development tools yet use markdown or asciidoc, some are beginning to incorporate it. Worst case, you can copy and paste the content to the rapid development tool once the back and forth with the client/sponsor has led to agreement for the training.

Also if using voiceover, the script can be given to the voice talent to record the audio voiceover. If already in another rapid prototyping iteration and the voiceover is recorded, AsciiDoc allows easily adding the audio and the draft video too. The plain text syntax for that is audio::media/voiceover1.mp3, and adding the audio file to the media folder.

The biggest reason to use this approach is that the team can edit on the fly with the client/sponsor and re-render the storyboard in seconds. Clients/sponsors tend to enjoy this type of rapid prototyping immediate change to their feedback.