Week 1 Welcome & Introductions

Hi Everyone!

My name is Jake Whiteford and I am located in south central Pennsylvania. I work with the Innovations Institute at the University of Connecticut School of Social Work. Our work focuses on supporting the workforce in child-, youth-, and family-serving public systems. I am the instructional designer for our organization, which means I create the asynchronous online training modules that we produce for our partners. My day-to-day is made up mostly of working in Storyline (and occasionally Rise) to create modules from either PPT or a Word script and all of the steps in that process through to publishing files for our LMS. We are already using the AI assistant for voiceover/captions and I have used it occasionally to generate images (though our team's Shutterstock account still gets most of that work). I've also used it in Rise to generate a course from a Word doc. I'd like to learn what I'm not using and also ideally how to use AI assistant to create Java Script triggers that will liven up my modules. Learning Java to do this has been on my "to do" list for years, but I never had the time to learn it. I'm hoping that this will be a nice shortcut. In terms of pets...we have so many. We have three cats, three dogs, and a horse (who unfortunately does not live at the house, though I wish we had a farm so he could). Since his "gotcha day" was on Sunday, I'll share a photo of our boy cat, Chester.

Hello! My name is Cindy Owen, Talent Manager for Elara Caring. I am based out of Michigan and oversee our new team member onboarding across 18 states and manage the day-to-day activities for the LMS. We often add custom courses to our LMS so excited to learn more about AI generated courses. 

Hi Folks - I'm in the UK and I work for a healthcare transformation organisation.  I'm a Senior Learning Designer and I work across the full end-to-end activities of the learning lifecycle.  I use Articulate 360 Rise and Storyline to enable the creation of engaging learning content. Joining this cohort will give me a more formal and structured approach in which to continue my Articulate AI upskilling. Looking forward to learning alongside everyone in this May 2026 cohort!  Feel free to read more about me on my Linkedin page here and please do send me a connection request. 

Hi, everyone! My name is Beth Conn, and I am an Instructional Designer at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. I am excited to learn how to use AI Assistant to help increase productivity and creativity! This is going to be awesome!

My dog Yeti is a 6-year-old hot mess of a big baby. He likes to sleep in between me and my husband and must be touching me at all times 🤣.

Hi all,

My name is Joanne, and I am the LMS Admin/Analyst for Liveops. Please reach out on LinkedIn if you would like to connect.

I'm passionate about professional development and learning new things - so that is why I am here.

Hi everybody! My name is Katie and I am a Lead Learning Experience designer at Rapid7 in Austin, Texas. In my role, I design training focused on our cybersecurity products, primarily to support and educate partner resellers.

I also serve as the LMS administrator, UX designer, and creator of courses, job aids, and certification exams for our Partner Academy. Articulate has significantly enhanced the learning experience we deliver and increased overall engaged! 

 I'm excited to continue exploring its AI capabilities, both to further improve our programs and to help enable my team to reach and impact even more learners.

Hello from Olympia, Washington! 👋 Nice to meet everyone. I'm Laura and I work as an Organizational Learning Specialist for Washington State Employees Credit Union (WSECU). My day-to-day involves facilitating virtual training for new hires, LMS admin, and building eLearning.

I'm using the AI Assistant already (what a fantastic tool!) and am looking forward to unlocking more of its capabilities and discovering how to gain more efficiencies. Seeing everyone's pet pictures is a bonus! I don't have a pet, but I do have a toddler who keeps me plenty busy 😄

Hi everyone!

I am Whitney Woodard and I am from the Huntsville, Alabama area. I currently work for the Aerospace Company, Blue Origin where I am an instructional designer and facilitator of our New Employee Orientation. My work at Blue Origin includes; e-learning development, and workshop building. I love building courses for a rocket company! It's super cool to see our work effect those that are actually touching the end-product. 

The reason I chose to take this course is because I use Rise and Storyline on a daily basis but still consider myself a beginner. Looking forward to learning how the AI assistant can help me with my everyday work. 

Hello!  My name is Jean-Ann and I'm a Learning Developer for Roche Diagnostics in Indianapolis, Indiana.  I've been in the online learning industry for many years.  I'm currently also going back to school for my masters degree in Instructional Design Technology!  

I joined the AI Assistant Cohort because my company recently turned on the AI Assistant and all of the features and I want to learn more and make sure that I'm using all that is available to me.  I'm very excited to learn more and learn how others are using it.  

I have two Newfoundland dogs, Bear and Lido.  They are 13.5 and 5 years old.  They love the snow and the cold here in the winter.  They are big sweeties!  

Hello! My name is Jackie and I'm a Senior Security Training and Awareness Program Manager at Centene :) I'm currently living in the Los Angeles area (Southbay if you're local!) with my two kids, and husband. I work remotely, but love to get out of the house and find local coffee shops, etc. when I can sneek away! Looking forward to learning a lot with everyone :)