Didactic Design through Storyboarding: Standard Concepts for Standard Tools Klaus P. Jantke Deutsches Forschungszentrum f¨ ur K¨ unstliche Intelligenz (DFKI) GmbH Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3 66123 Saarbr¨ ucken Germany jantke@dfki.de Rainer Knauf TechnischeUniversit¨atIlmenau FG K¨ unstliche Intelligenz Postfach 10 05 65 98693 Ilmenau Germany rainer.knauf@tu-ilmenau.de Abstract The current state of affair in e-learning world-wide shows a reluctance to didactic design. Learners frequently complain and scientists discuss about insufficient adaptivity of e-learning offers to the learners’ needs. Didactics is badly underestimated. High quality didactic design is seen as a crucial aspect of dissemination. E-learning content and services need to reach their audience properly. Learners with different prerequisites, with different needs, with different expectations and under varying context conditions have to be addressed appropriately. Didactic design is seen as an issue of quality assurance in e-learning. As well-known from quality management, high quality requirements and related measures towards quality assurance may turn out to be obstacles to dissemination, because quality may turn out to be expensive. The related answer are solutions frequently called quick and dirty. This does apply to e-learning as well. The authors’ own storyboard concept is introduced. Its reach goes far beyond the limits of current practices in e-learning systems and service development. The modeling concepts required are standard: annotated graphs. The software in use is standard as well: Visio. Emphasis is put on the investigation of how a suitable usage of the concepts allows for an expressive didactic design. To sum up, the authors’ intended contribution is twofold. First, they want to encourage didactic design through storyboarding in e-learning. Concepts are introduced and applications are demonstrated. Second, with the dissemination problem in mind, they want to show that concepts are crucial, but not tools. One can exploit advanced concepts toward sophisticated didactic design without an urgent need for costly software. 1 Didactics in e-Learning: Sketch of a Motivation Designing and implementing e-learning systems does require a huge amount of knowledge from a variety of disciplines. Even under a very rough classification, at least the area of studies itself and information and communication technologies are easily identified as two major knowledge domains. Ambitious e-learning which aims at attractive services and cognitively adequate learner-machine interaction assumes a further type of background knowledge: didactics. The state of affair in e-learning currently shows some obvious reluctance to didactic design. Learners complain and scientists discuss about insufficient adaptivity of e-learning offers to the learners’ needs [17]. Didactics is badly underestimated. How to encourage didactic design in e-learning? How to bring in didactic knowledge? How to make didactic variants subject to discussion and, more systematically, to quality assurance? How to establish a didactic design practice effordably, but not quick and dirty?