Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

nize clearly how to begin a story, what to present
in the middle and how to end it, so as to create an
effective narrative.
The purpose of a good Begin is to grab the
listeners’ attention, such that they want to find
out more. Then the Middle can be used to deliver
the message or knowledge, and the End should
conclude the Story Unit and link it to the next,
unless it is the very last one. When creating an
educational story, if the author starts straightaway
by relating facts and figures, the learners’ interest
often wanes. Therefore, getting the listeners
emotionally engaged is of paramount importance,
and a good Begin should do just that.
To produce a story that keeps the listeners
engaged throughout the discourse, it must link
the Story Units into an effectively plot and present
the plot as an engaging narrative. Often the
Middle occupies a major proportion of any Story
Unit. To keep the audience engaged even through
the middle of the story, the events presented in it
should be linked in a cause and effect manner.
For MOD, it implies that as a Movement answers
some questions raised in a previous Movement,
it should raise some more questions, which
are answered in the following Movement(s).
Therefore, developing a good narrative using
MOD becomes a recursive process, where the
entire story has its Begin (B), Middle (M) and
End (E) components; and then each of these can
be broken into their B, M, E components, till we
find Movements, i.e. micro-stories that have B,
M, and E components that are small enough to
be implemented directly.
MOD Example
An example of the application of the MOD methodology
is given here to clarify how an educational
idea can be developed into a narrative. The objective
of this example is to show how the process of
selecting B, M, E components, and then expanding
these into their own B, M, E components can be
carried out systematically.
72
Using Storytelling as the Pedagogical Model for Web-Based Learning
The MOD-based story development process
is shown here up to three stages. In some story
development projects this process may have to
go deeper. The B, M, E components need to be
expanded until Movements are discovered. The
decision if there is the need to expand the B, M, E
components any further, or otherwise, is a creative
choice made by the author. In general, the author
will stop further expansion when she can see (in
the eye of her mind) how to instantiate each B,
M, and E component of a Movement.
The purpose of this educational story being developed
in this example is to explain the important
aspects of electric current to high school students;
this example is taken almost verbatim from the
seminal MOD paper by Sharda (2005).
We begin by articulating the concept of electric
current as a problem that needs to be solved.
Next, we state the solution as a generic statement,
and then expand it into its first level Begin (B1),
Middle (M1), and End (E1) components. At this
stage we express these (B, M, E) components only
as statements, i.e. ideas about how these may be
instantiated.
STAGE-1
Problem: What is Electric Current?Solution:
Explain the meaning of electric current
B1 Demonstrate the importance of electric
current
M1 Define and exemplify electric current
E1 What determines electric current
strength?
In Stage-2 of the story development process,
each of the Stage-1 story components (B1, M1 and
E1) are expanded into their own B, M, E components.
In Stage-2 story, the label B1,B2 stands for
the Begin of the story unit B1, and the label M1,E2
stands for the End of the story unit M1.