If there’s one buzzword you can’t get away from in eLearning, it’s responsiveness. That’s with good reason—today’s learner uses multiple devices to engage with content, and the courses we’re putting out there have to keep up. In fact, 87% of Millennials always have their smartphone by their side, day or night. That means responsive learning is not just a priority, it’s a necessity.

Enter Articulate Rise, an authoring tool that takes a unique, inherently responsive approach to putting together a course. The beauty of Rise is in its ease and simplicity—you build the course once, and it’s automatically adapted to any device that accesses it. Rise is pretty popular here at Maestro HQ, and we’re doing a lot of exciting work with the tool. We know the ins and outs of the platform, and we know a lot of developers are wondering why Rise is such a big deal.

Let’s dig into what we love about Rise and what it takes to develop in it.

What Is Rise?

Rise is part of the Articulate suite of authoring tools, and it takes a component-based approach to building a course. The idea is to organize your multimedia content within Rise to create courses that are beautiful, responsive, and easy to navigate. While the component approach might sound limiting, there are actually endless possibilities in how you design and execute your courses. Plus, what you lose in customization you make up for in other features.

Here are a few key highlights:

Web-based courses. Rise is a completely web-based tool, which means no software to download and no new program to learn (fist pump!). You’ll author your courses online, too, which makes it easier to collaborate and share with others while you build your course. Likewise, learners access Rise courses online, so all they need is a link to get started. If your learners are often on-the-go, traveling, or juggling multiple devices, this is a big bonus.

Component-based design. The component approach to building a course gives you a lot of flexibility—choose an existing course outline for more rapid development, or start from scratch for a customized approach. Rise components can be interactive—think flashcards and sorting—and include different types of media. When you talk to a designer who uses Rise, one of the first words out of their mouth will likely be “beautiful,” because Rise courses look really, really good. If you have a lot of multimedia content to share, Rise allows you to organize it into different components that look good and engage the learner.

Responsiveness. As we mentioned, Rise courses are inherently responsive, no matter the device. Courses you build in Rise will automatically adapt to fit the screen size and orientation that your learners are using. For a generation of learners who expect their learning to be accessible on computers, tablets, and phones alike, automatic responsiveness is critical.

Self-paced learning. Rise courses are structured to put the user at the center of the experience, allowing them to learn and navigate at their own pace. Instead of a voiceover-driven experience, Rise uses multimedia content and interactive components to guide and engage the learner.

What’s the User Experience?

Rise is pretty unique in the eLearning space for its approach to the learning experience. The tool abandons much of the rigidity of voiceover-driven courses to instead get learners interacting with the different course components. For the learner, that means shorter seat times and dynamic lessons that have them tapping, sliding, and swiping through multimedia content.

But you can still deploy voiceover direction within the course to support learning at critical moments and help users navigate the course. The idea here is to put the learner at the center of the experience. Users will learn through matching challenges, flashcards, labeled graphics, videos, and more.

You can choose whether users will navigate freely throughout the course or complete lessons in order. Restricted navigation means they’ll have to complete one lesson before proceeding to the next, while free navigation allows them to jump in and out of different lessons. In both modes, users have easy access to the navigation menu and a visual indicator of their learning progress.

What Does It Take to Develop in Rise?

The short answer: all you need to develop in Rise is an Articulate 360 subscription. Developing in Rise is easy at the base level, thanks to the “building blocks” approach that allows you to select from a variety of existing lessons. Each lesson has different levels of customization, and there are ways to add several components together, like adding lists, flashcards, or tabs. You can also customize the course’s theme and change colors and fonts to integrate with your branding.

Once you’ve started developing, you can collaborate within Rise by inviting team members to edit lessons and make changes in real time. Articulate also has Articulate Review, a tool to facilitate project reviews by streamlining feedback and collaboration. Like Rise, Articulate Review is web-based, so you won’t need to download any new software to use it. When you’ve finalized your course, you can upload it to your LMS system to easily manage and track learning.

While anyone can learn to develop a decent course in Rise, we’re having a little fun with it at Maestro. Rise is a sophisticated platform, and we’re taking advantage of that to innovate and push the limits in how we design courses for our clients. The results? We’re doing things we haven’t seen anyone else do with Rise, from how we design a page to hidden pathways that the average user wouldn’t know. Our expertise elevates the final product for clients, and our interactive designers get to nerd out. Everyone wins.