Week 1 Welcome & Introductions

Howdy, all!

I'm Zack from Alabama. I work at Alfa Insurance as a Trainer and Instructional Designer. Our team consists of an LMS admin and 8 trainers who create and implement in-person learning, e-learning experiences, plus other training content.

Our team has seen a massive increase in productivity since we implemented enterprise Copilot and the Articulate AI tools, so I'm hoping to see how to get more out of it!

We have four cats, but here's a diptych of our oldest, Debward: I use it as a part of my intro slide when I do ILTs.

Our church holds a "blessing of the pets" for the feast day of St. Francis, so we walked him down on his leash. He hated it.

Derek G. Tulsa, Ok, Williams, Instructional Designer III. Always interested in learning all the features. Hoping to learn something new I didn't know.

I'm Eric Melvin. I am a Senior Enterprise Learning Systems Analyst for Marathon Petroleum Corporation out of our Russell, Kentucky office, not far from the Ohio River. I develop and maintain courses in Articulate Rise and Storyline, set up and assign courses in our LMS, and support our business partners and their training initiatives. I also support our folks around the company who utilize Articulate. I started developing eLearning courses back in the days of Macromedia Flash, which later became Adobe Flash. I moved to the Articulate platform around 2017, and have been utilizing it for course development ever since.

I joined this AI cohort to hopefully learn some new skills that will enhance our course development process and share those skills with other course developers at my company.

Good Monday Morning everyone!

My name is Sarah, I am the Instructional Design and Learning Content Manager for Rack Room Shoes (including Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse and Rookie Kids).  Our HQ is in Charlotte NC.  I have been with this company since 2011 and on the L&D side since 2013.  I have worked in Articulate for the last 13 years and was certified through both Yukon and Training Magazine.  I am really interested in mastering the AI assistant to get a new skill under my belt and to keep up with the fresh talent that is coming into our field.  

I have 4 animals.  2 Cats (Chipper and Little Kittle) and 2 dogs (Tucker and Dallas).  They keep me busy. 

Hello, everyone! I'm Jessica Souter, and I'm located in southwest Florida. I work for a managed vision care company as an instructional designer. In my role, I design and develop training materials mostly for call center representatives. A lot of the materials within the curricula I manage are virtual instructor-led; however, my team is hoping to expand the offerings to utilize more self-paced content, including innovative opportunities for practical application.

This is where learning more about the AI functionalities within Articulate comes in. With the knowledge I gain from participating in this cohort, I hope to be able to more efficiently and effectively develop those materials to create a more positive learning experience for our trainees!

Hi Everyone, my name is Melinda Keske and I am the Senior Administrator, Learning Management for the American Academy of Dermatology. I help produce courses that our members can take to earn their cme credits. I am joining the cohort to learn more about how we can incorporate AI into our course development.

Hi! My name is Brittany Hammer, and I’m based in Rochester, MN. I work at Mayo Clinic as a Field Sales and Service Manager, where I support our sales and service representatives. My primary focus is managing the CMS and LMS platforms our teams use for training and resources.

I joined the AI Assistant Certification Cohort because it seemed like a great opportunity to learn more about a tool I haven’t explored much yet. I’m excited to dive deeper into its functionality so I can apply it to my own training work and share insights with my colleagues to help them better leverage it as well.

Outside of work, I have three dogs: Chester and Lulu, who are Golden Retrievers (pictured) and never leave each other’s side, and Beatrice, an almost 14-year-old Silky Terrier who prefers to keep her distance from the chaos of the younger two.

Hello everyone. My name is Angela Hearst. I live in Winter Park, FL. I'm an instructional designer. I tend to follow the Design Thinking process and enjoy every step, but my two favorites are empathize and iterate.
I work from home and am closely supervised by two siblings, MiMo (boy, left) and Ella (girl, right). They excel at snuggling, napping, and shredding paper bags.
I feel pretty comfortable with the AI features in Rise and Storyline but I know I have more to learn there. I'm excited to learn from each of you too!

Hello! My name is Maria. I work for Presbyterian Homes & Services in Minnesota. I currently serve as the Onboarding Program Manager where I get to help welcome new employees, building training, and many other duties as assigned. 

I am looking forward to learning to make engaging content in more efficient ways for our employees. I also look forward to being inspired by all of the other creative minds in this group. 

This is one of my daughter's baby goats, Opal. If you need a little laugh in your day, google baby goat videos. They are hilarious!

Hi folks!  I am Brenna, located in the beautiful Catskill Mountains of New York, USA and I am an Instructional Designer for Verizon. I am looking forward to learning more about how to leverag AI in e-learning. Here is a picture of Wendel, ready for a winter day in the mountains.