Two figures looking at a large laptop. On the screen is a number of different web browser screens that have been put into a blender.

Rise 360 has always been an excellent course creation option for quickly creating beautiful, responsive e-learning. And with our customizable real content templates, you can create engaging training faster than ever! 

With real content templates, you can either grab an entire course or insert lessons individually, creating a more custom learning experience.

But if you decide to mix and match lessons, how do you know which ones to choose? Great question! In this article I’ll walk you through a quick process that’ll help you curate just the right course for your learners’ needs.

1) Outline the Challenges Your Course Needs to Solve

There are lots of fantastic lesson templates to choose from, but which ones are going to be most effective in addressing your project’s goals? By clearly outlining the specific topics, details, and learning objectives you need your course to cover, you’ll be better able to choose the right lessons to include.

How specific you get in your outline often depends on the challenge you’re trying to solve. If your goal is more general—for instance, guiding new managers on basic leadership skills—your list of what the course needs to cover might be more general as well. However, if the goal is more targeted—such as helping employees recognize the 5 types of phishing emails your company regularly receives—then expect your outline to be more specific.

2) Browse the Lesson Templates and Curate

Once you have a better sense of what your course does (and doesn’t) need to include, it’s time to peruse the wide range of options the lesson templates can provide. Thankfully, finding just the right content for your course is supereasy. Simply browse by category or use the Search bar to quickly locate specific topics. Then, preview the lessons that stand out to you and just click to add the ones you want to use.

 

 

In the case of our more general example, browsing through the Leadership category would help you uncover lesson topics that seem particularly approachable for new managers. And with our more targeted challenge, searching for the term “phishing” would quickly bring up the specific content you need.

3) Organize the Lessons in a Helpful Order

Once you’ve picked out your lessons, think about the flow of information in your course. Are there lessons that make more sense at the beginning of the course? How about at the end? Are there topics that naturally lead into or build on each other?

By arranging your lessons thoughtfully, you can make your course easier for learners to understand. And since rearranging lessons in Rise 360 is as simple as dragging and dropping them in a new order, these adjustments take almost no time at all.

 

4) Customize the Lesson Content as Needed

Our real content lesson templates are complete and can be used just as they are. But you can also customize them further if needed.

In many situations your updates will just be simple refinements. For instance, you could add short segues at the end of each lesson that smoothly lead learners into the next topic. Or you might want to streamline the introductions and conclusions for each lesson since they’re now part of a larger course.

In some cases, though, you might make more extensive customizations to tailor the content to your learners, organization, or goals. For instance, you might want to bring in your own examples, scenarios, images, quiz questions, and more to personalize it for your needs. And in situations where you need more narrow or company-specific content, you can even create your own new sections and lessons to supplement prebuilt options.

Wrap-Up

That’s right: in just a few steps it’s possible to curate the exact course your learners and organization need. As you can imagine, that means these new real content lesson templates can substantially speed up your workflow. And they can also enable subject matter experts and other people new to e-learning to craft effective courses themselves too!

Curious about how to target just the right content for your courses? Take a peek at these articles:

And to learn even more about templates in Rise 360, check out these helpful articles: 

Want to try using the new Rise 360 prebuilt lessons, 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.

11 Comments
Bianca Woods

Hi Corey! Layout is definitely a complex topic, often without one single right answer. When it comes to font sizes in Rise 360 the safest option is often to stick with the pre-set sizes. I regularly tell people that it actually takes work to make a Rise 360 course look awkward because the default settings take care of a lot of the hard layout choices for you. If you do want to change them, keep it simple and associate a font size with a specific kind of content. So maybe your body text is the smallest size, your sub-headers are all a consistent middle size, and your headers are all the same large size. Just make sure those size jumps are large enough to be easily noticed and there aren't too many of them. As for using different blocks together, I've rarely seen an instance wher... Expand