When to Choose Articulate Rise? 5 Don’t-Miss Situations in eLearning

Are you thinking of which authoring tool to use for eLearning development? You have plenty of choices in the form of Adobe Captivate, Lectora Inspire, Articulate Storyline, Articulate Rise and many more. While all of them provide great features that allow the rapid development of engaging and interactive eLearning courses, do they seem more similar than different?

Well, indeed ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ This excerpt from George Orwell’s novella, Animal Farm fits like a glove when it comes to rapid authoring tools. Authoring tool have their differences and unique strengths, which make them stand out from others. It all comes down to choosing the right one pertaining to your unique organizational needs and situations.

In this post, let’s look more closely at the newest kid on the block – Articulate Rise. This web-based authoring app comes with Articulate 360 and enables the development of enhanced online courses in a cinch! 

5 Situations You Can Zero-In on Articulate Rise for Your Training Needs

1. Convert Text-based Courses to Smart Digital Learning

If your organization is planning to move away from tedious text-based and text-heavy courses to digital learning, opting for Articulate Rise is a handy option. Much like one of our clients, one of the world’s largest medical associations that provides educational and practice management services to health professionals and surgeons globally. To educate and inform these health professionals, the association was disseminating study materials in the form of PDFs.

Now, imagine having to go through lengthy PDFs that are text-heavy and seldom provide visual respite. Do you think such PDFs can hook learners for long? Hence, to make learning engaging and ensure it sticks, our client decided to digitize the curriculum. What’s in store with Rise for such a situation?

Articulate Rise provides the option of using extremely flexible components called learning blocks (similar to slides) to develop custom eLearning courses. These learning blocks can be customized and designed to create specific layouts. You can select from the Block Library to include a variety of:

• Text Blocks
• Multimedia Blocks
• Quote Blocks
• Statement Blocks
• Gallery Blocks
• Image Blocks
• List Blocks

Additionally, to raise the engagement of the course, Rise also has interactive blocks such as Accordion, Flash Cards, Tabs, and Knowledge Questions. The range of block types fosters the development of cleaner courses with smaller chunks of information. And since these come in-built, the block or stack of blocks can be saved as templates for future use as well. Also, if your organization wants to digitize textbook chapters into eLearning courses, opting for Rise will be the right choice.

2. Rapid Custom eLearning Development

Articulate Rise offers a slew of amazing features when it comes to rapid eLearning course development. These features are imperative, considering your tight training budget and strict timelines to meet.

• Unlike other rapid authoring tools such as Captivate, Storyline, and Lectora, Rise is completely web-based. This app by Articulate 360 enables course development anytime, anywhere, without downloading any software. All that is required is a web browser.

• Rise also provides for easy collaboration and authoring for the development team. How is it beneficial for your organization? Different members on the team can be invited to develop and edit different lessons simultaneously or even take turns to polish the same, allowing faster completion.

• Rise makes use of the template course creation builder. To put it simply, course developers are simply required to choose the structure of the course and input the text and media. Pre-built templates can be opted for a rapid approach and if you are looking for slightly more customization, blocks are the ones to go for, either way a time-saver.

• The cherry on the cake is Articulate Review which comes with the suite. This eases the process of review and feedback since you have the option of directly commenting on the created work. This makes it easy for the course development team to collect in-context feedback and implement them for faster completion of the project.

3. Mobile-first Online Courses 

Since 57% of people use more than one device and 80% use a smartphone, it’s imperative for your organization to provide online courses that are device-agonistic. And here’s why you should opt for Articulate Rise when it comes to mobile-first online courses.

• Since Rise is based on Responsive Design unlike adaptive, course developers need not design a course multiple times for different devices. They neither have to tweak the breakpoints, saving ample development time. All your courses developed in Rise will be inherently responsive and designed with the mobile in mind.

• With the Responsive Preview option, you have the option to preview lessons as well as the entire course before final publishing. This allows seeing how the course will look on different device types, be it desktops, tablets, or smartphones. This ensures your learners have the same learning experience, irrespective of the device used.

• Rise app accounts for every pixel, to optimize the content display for smaller screens. It hides the menu-bar, scales media elements, and reflows content so that learners undergo an uninterrupted learning experience, even on the smallest screen. The Responsive Mobile Player provides support for mobile gestures and handheld friendly device navigation.

4. Seamless Integration with Articulate Storyline

Articulate Rise has a set of fixed interactivities that produce excellent results, but what if you want more robust interaction than what Rise offers? Well, in case you have great eLearning content that was developed in Articulate Storyline, you can reuse it for your Rise courses.

Are you also looking for more freeform question types to assess learning in contrast to Rise’s built-in form-based questions? Then, what is required? Publish your Storyline 360 course to Articulate Review, embed it within the Rise course, and there you go!

Thereby, your learners will experience the best of both worlds! Elegant looking responsive eLearning content from Rise, and the additional engagement and interaction of Storyline. This seamless integration with Articulate Storyline surely makes it a worthy choice for eLearning course development.

5. Easy Content Updates

One of the many reasons Articulate Rise is gaining popularity is its easy learning curve. Wondering why the learning curve is relevant to you even if you outsource the course to a vendor?

Well, if your organization has to frequently make changes to the existing courses and keep them updated to meet the latest developments, opting for this app makes much sense. The easy and simple interface enables even a novice developer to do the updates with ease. This implies you need not outsource the updates to an eLearning vendor again, and rather commence it in-house. What’s not to love here when you certainly save on your previous training dollars and time?

Articulate Rise is an excellent authoring tool considering it addresses a key issue than its more conventional counterparts – ease of use. Although Rise app seems very much a plug-and-play solution, it can produce gorgeous courses that are completely responsive. If you need to develop eLearning courses in a short period of time, that look great and track results correctly, Articulate Rise should be at the top of your list.