Articulate Rise – Does It Rise to the Occasion?

The Articulate Storyline family of offerings keeps getting better! The Storyline 360 suite came with a lot of additional bells and whistles, one of them being Articulate Rise.

What does Rise achieve? Well, Rise is a web app that helps create fully responsive eLearning courses. Be ready, though, to change your perceptions if you are looking at multi-device deployment – on the desktop, courses created with Rise render more like a set of web pages, than like a conventional course with a shell et al. Nothing wrong with that; just different from what you might expect if you have orthodox expectations.

That said, let’s discuss some of the good things, and the not-so-good, about Articulate Rise.

The Good Things

There are a few pre-built lesson types, and you can import/embed content from external sources. You can use ‘blocks’ to create customized content types. And, you can build a quiz consisting of multiple choice questions.

Rise considers each page, or screen, to be a ‘lesson’.  So, you create these lessons and can preview each lesson individually – in various aspect ratios – and fine tune them as you go along. A course is a collection of all these lessons.

Once you are done with your course, you can export it as a package (SCORM, AICC, web… not yet Tin Can), and there you have it – a perfectly responsive course!

Here are some more positives:

• Easy to use, intuitive
• Pre-built lesson types – includes video, labelled graphic, process and timeline, sorting activity and quiz
• Asset library – includes royalty-free stock assets that are derived from a number of sources
• Navigation – free or restricted
• Preview options – preview for various devices and orientation

The Not-So-Good Things

Nothing’s perfect, nor is Rise. It sorely lacks variety – of templates, design, fonts – and control. For one, you can’t combine pre-built lesson types with custom blocks. You can use one, or the other – not both.

I also noticed some aspects that make for a poor user experience on a mobile device. In one instance of the drag and drop activity, the screen scrolled up and down instead of the tiles getting dragged. Another issue I noticed was with the tabbed activity – unless you know you need to scroll sideways (especially when in portrait mode), you just might miss out on some of the information!

A few more points:

• Rise is available only with Articulate 360 subscriptions. This means it is not a standalone product
• You cannot export content into, or from, Storyline; hence your content gets isolated in either of the tools
• Rise does not allow adding background images/videos to lessons
• Quiz question formats are currently limited to single-select textual questions
• There is currently no support for creating courses in different languages

So, What’s the Verdict?

There are a few hits and misses. Off-hand, it’s a great tool to create learning nuggets that are designed for mobile-based learning. Not fancy, but effective. If you can live with the limitations, Rise has the makings of a great tool. If, however, you lean towards a rich user experience, Rise might leave you a tad disappointed.

To view a sample of a course created in Rise, click here. If you’re reading this on a desktop or a laptop, you could scan this QR code to view it on your smartphone.