New Features in Articulate Rise Overcome Prior Limitations
Two New Blocks Give Designers More Flexibility
If you’ve worked with Articulate Rise, you likely already know its biggest perk: it lets you quickly produce e-learning courses. Rise keeps things simple — your content snaps neatly into place, it automatically formats the content to any screen size, and you don’t have to know any programming. But that simplicity has always come with a trade-off. While Rise makes development incredibly efficient, it also limits how interactive you can make a course.
For years, Rise has relied on two core principles to streamline the development process:
While these principles reduce development time, they also restrict instructional designers who want to create custom interactions that better support the learning objectives. That’s why the latest Rise features are a big step forward. Articulate has introduced two new block types that significantly expand what can be done in the tool:
- Custom Block: Designers can now add and arrange shapes, text, images, audio, and video within a flexible canvas. This enables more sophisticated layouts, where the designer is in control of how screen space is used. However, these blocks don’t support responsive design, so they may not display optimally on mobile devices. Rise also offers 10 premade custom blocks you can tailor to your content: Comparisons, Conversations, Core Concepts, Diagrams, Introductions, Mixed Media, Organization, Personas, Prompts, and Testimonials.
- Code Block: Developers can embed custom interactivity using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Simple code can be entered directly while more complex interactions can be uploaded as zipped folders. Code blocks can also signal completion status to Rise using JavaScript.
Together, these enhancements give designers greater flexibility, allowing for more engaging and customized learning experiences while still maintaining the benefits of responsive design and easy authoring in the rest of the course.
As Rise continues to evolve, we expect creating smart, engaging, custom e-learning courses will only get easier. If you’ve ever felt that you were limited by Rise before, now is the perfect time to take another look and see how much more it can do.
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