This year, our team at Articulate has been hitting the road: we’re traveling all across North America to bring learnings from our team and our community to you, in person. We call it: Articuland ✨ (”The Eras Tour” was taken). Our first ever, sold-out tour stop took place in sunny Austin, TX at the beginning of May.
When we weren’t busy eating BBQ or listening to country music on Red River Street, we were with our incredible Articulate users in the JW Marriott Ballroom talking all things Articulate: from sharing big-picture insights on asynchronous learning to nerding out about specific Rise blocks you can use to make your courses more interactive.
We had so much fun in Austin, and we heard attendees loved it, too: a big thank you to MariaElenaHerna, AlanaKubeczka, and FrancisBombus for sharing your thoughts with us on LinkedIn (you can check out what Maria had to say here, what Alana had to say here, and what Francis had to say here). And, we were so thrilled to hear from attendee survey respondents that you loved getting opportunities to network with other community members, and that the events were accessible to all skill levels.
There are still Articuland events ahead of us: our upcoming tours in Seattle and Toronto are both sold out, but there are still a few tickets left for our two-day summit in Boston in September.
We know our community of E-Learning Heroes are spread all over the globe, so if you aren’t able to see us in person this year, we wanted to share some of the key takeaways from our first event with you here in the community.
Six Top Learnings from Articuland: Austin
1. Sometimes creating engaging content means letting learners learn on their own time.
The session: Community member AlanaKubeczka highlighted how asynchronous courses can boost learner engagement. Alana emphasized using bite-sized self-graded knowledge checks to help learners stay engaged, even if an instructor isn’t right in front of them.
Your takeaway: Alana suggests adding what she calls a “Rise warm-up” at the beginning of your course—a short, interactive component that eases learners into the experience before diving into the core content. Think self-graded quizzes, flashcards, sorting activities, or scenario blocks to boost early engagement. Plus, she shared this Best Practices for Designing eLearning in Articulate Rise resource that attendees loved.
2. You can make your content more engaging with one key reframe.
The session: Our very own TomKuhlmann, Chief Learning Architect and OG community member here at Articulate, gave a session sharing practical skills that can boost engagement with your e-learning content. Tom noted that because online learners tend to be easily distracted, they typically engage only at about a 30% rate, and suggested some skills to increase that number.
Your takeaway: Forget the notion that you need to do a ton of fancy customizations to engage learners. Instead, focus on making learners the decision-makers by making them address real-life scenarios and creating opportunities for learners to "touch the screen", like mouse-overs and click-and-reveal.
3. Storytelling is your strongest job-hunting skill in e-learning.
The session: Community member AshleyCox presented on the importance of using a portfolio, not just a resume, to land a job in the e-learning industry. In Ashley’s presentation, she highlighted the importance of sharing a wide variety of work in your portfolio: not just your finished projects, but your process. She talked about how strong portfolios tell a story of how the designer works—from ideation to delivery.
Your takeaway: If you’re not keeping track of your work in a portfolio yet, it’s time to start. Focus on using a variety of examples—from storyboards, to design elements, to finished courses—to tell your story. You can check out Ashley’s deck to help walk you through the process, or join other community members discussing and sharing examples of their portfolios here.
4. Replace simple slide decks with decision-based design.
The session: Community member IsmaelNava took a novel approach to his presentation, shifting away from focusing on specific building blocks in Rise or Storyline. Instead, he focussed on teaching an agile approach to developing engaging content.
Your takeaway: Use backward planning and action mapping to cut the fluff and drive results. By using action mapping, you’re shifting from asking “what do we want learners to know” to “what do we want learners to be able to do for the organization?”
5. Gamification isn’t just fun, it’s strategic.
The session: Community member MosesJaxon did something community members here in ELH love—he walked through a specific example of a course he actually created to illustrate key concepts in gamification. Moses' approach to gamification took nods from video games: wrapping the whole experience in a creative setting, letting the learner choose a character, and walking the learner through various scenarios to build their skills.
Your takeaway: Celebrate your learners with simple touches like tokens, badges, and sound effects. Even seemingly small touches, like applause effects for progress, create positive reinforcement and boost both engagement and results. Our Share Examples forum is an amazing place to check out examples of gamified content to get inspired.
6. Creating interactive courses doesn’t have to be rocket science.
The session: Lastly, our very own community team member GingerSwart delivered a presentation on building courses in Rise with an eye toward interactivity, without taking a ton of time or added complexity. Attendees loved this presentation—Ginger took an innovative approach to creating engaging e-learning using basic out-of-the-box Rise blocks, for example using simple image, text, and flashcard blocks to achieve a learning scenario that may have taken much longer to build in Storyline.
Your takeaway: Members particularly resonated with Ginger’s demonstration of using custom dividers in Rise, which you can see a community tutorial on here. Our E-Learning Challenge on the same topic provides more inspiration on creative applications of this idea.
A huge thank you and shout out to all of our speakers—our in-person attendees loved learning from you. If you weren’t able to join us live, we hope you enjoyed these quick takeaways.
For anyone who joined us in Austin, we loved meeting you. You can say hi in the comments here, or stay in contact with us here on our Austin meetup thread.
For any E-Learning Heroes community members in Boston, there’s still time to register for our two day summit—we hope to see you there!
And for our community members that we’re only connecting with virtually for now, we’d love to hear from you in the comments:
💬 If you were leading a session at an Articuland tour, what would your session be on?
