Articulate has been teasing something big for the last couple of weeks, and now, finally, the new Articulate 360 is with us. An all-inclusive subscription to Articulate’s eLearning development tools.
Among the slew of new and improved tools sits Rise, a cloud-based, one-stop shop for responsive and rapid eLearning development.
We’ve only had a day to play with it, but we’re already in love.
It’s quick, easy, and intuitive
Articulate has always been great at designing simple and effective user interfaces. While they borrowed heavily from PowerPoint in previous outings of Storyline; you never felt lost or overwhelmed by the interface.
Articulate 360, with Rise — the new responsive authoring tool that’s included in the annual membership — has kicked things up a notch in terms of simple, clean, intuitive design and functionality.
Creating a responsive course is a case of a couple of clicks right within your browser. So, now you can take your work with you wherever you go, and even work on Mac too!
It’s responsive (like really, real responsive)
Our team has been drooling over the prospect of a fully responsive rapid-authoring tool for a while now. Rise (as they constantly reminded us in the promotional videos), ‘looks great!’.
While competitors have had their own take on tackling this feature, Articulate have really nailed it with Rise’s capabilities. They’ve delivered a simple and elegant way to build truly responsive content — without the need to reformat anything.
It’s making eLearning design cool again
One of our team’s biggest gripes with rapid-authoring tools is that regardless of how great our content looks when we’re designing it, we’re always limited by slide-based delivery.
It looks like the team at Articulate have realised this too because Rise delivers an experience that feels much more at home on the web. Get ready to scroll through your learning content like it’s just another part of the Internet!
Something we don’t love
So, our gripes are rather minor because we’re still basking in Rise’s glow, but this initial release is very limited if you want to create more than basic, rapid courses.
At the moment, the user interface settings are limited to basic accent colours and logos. Fonts are locked in, interactions are predefined, and from what we can tell, you can’t remove the menu from the sidebar.
The team has already been investigating the published outputs from Rise to test its application. Our experience with Articulate’s forums shows that this is something the community actively encourages, so we’re really looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with.
Rise is certainly a step in the right direction with its focus on truly responsive development. However, when are we going to get a pro-level eLearning authoring tool? Our team can’t wait to use Rise in upcoming projects and see what else Articulate has in store over the next few months.
