Branched scenarios are a great way to bring course content to life by challenging learners to make decisions and then giving them in-context, realistic feedback. And with two new features in Rise, now you can add them to your courses.

The first new feature lets you hide the previous and next buttons so that learners can navigate through your course by responding to thought-provoking questions in scenarios instead of by simply hitting Next. And the second new feature lets you hide the lesson count in your Rise courses to emphasize a nonsequential approach to exploring content.

Have a peek at this interactive branched scenario example that uses these new features:

View Example

To use these new features, just navigate to Settings, select the Navigation tab, and choose Off for these options:

To create the choices for the learner, this example uses the Button Stack block in Rise to create branches, which each link off to a separate follow-up lesson. To add a Button Stack, insert a blocks lesson in your Rise course, click the plus icon, then select Interactive from the menu that appears on the left. There you’ll find the Button Stack block, which you can then insert into your lesson.

You may also want to consider setting the sidebar option to “No Sidebar” when you’re creating scenarios in Rise. This will hide the list of lessons that appear on the Start page, and the sidebar that appears throughout the course. Removing the sidebar requires your learner to click through your scenario in order, which, in most cases, makes more sense than letting the learner skip questions in the scenario. You can also adjust this settings under the Navigation tab on the course Settings page.

Creating branched scenarios just got better with these Rise features. Open up Rise and try these features out for yourself!

Want to try something you learned here, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.

60 Comments
Cass Netzley
Cass Netzley
Max Ricketts
Matt Adlai-Gail
Lisa Johnson
Liz Luck
Nicole Legault

Hi Liz! For now Rise offers the following abilities for publishing to LMS: - Publish using course completion (you can set the percentage, or amount of the course they need to see to pass, from 0 to 100%). >> this may be the best option for your situation? - Publishing using Quiz result - Track using a Storyline block These are the options you have to work with, and you can only select one. So you'll have to work within these parameters, so I don't think you'll be able to track 2 different paths. At this point, I don't think its within Rise's capabilities, but thats definitely a great feature request. You can make a feature request here: https://articulate.com/support/contact/feature-request Might be worth posting it in the Rise forums as you may get more insights or idea... Expand

Dino Apostolopoulos
Nicole Legault
Lisa Johnson
Nicole Legault
Nicole Legault

Hi Lisa! Yes you are correct, branching really only works with Blocks lessons and you cannot add a button at the end of a pre-built lesson. We are actually currently working on turning many of the pre-built lessons into blocks, and the Process lesson is one of those. This means soon you'll be able to create a Blocks lesson, add a Process block, then add your Continue button or Button Stack block after the Process, to create the branching effect. I can't give a specific date, but it is coming soon. Just an FYI that we have this What's New page (https://articulate.com/360/whats-new) on our website where you can see what features are coming soon , just in case you're interested :) Also, if theres ever a feature you would like to see, please do feel free to submit a feature request ... Expand

Katalin Kovacs
Katalin Kovacs
Jordan Pipka

Is there a way to restrict navigation until the user visits all the pages linked in a button stack? HERE'S MY DILEMMA: I'm creating a course in Rise which I want to be free navigation. The users are not required to take the entire course but if they choose to, they can get credit. I've embedded a form into the course which I'm using as a makeshift Certificate of Completion. I want the users to have free navigation but if they choose to complete the course, the certificate form will pop up at the end, only after all of the content has been viewed. I tried to achieve this by disabling next/back buttons, setting sidebar to closed and then adding a "continue" block under the button stack which is set to "complete all blocks above." However, after testing the course, it allowed me to click c... Expand

Penny Spacht
Kaitrin Morrison