Week 1 Discussion

1. Which AI Assistant feature felt most intuitive or useful to you during the practice activities? Being able to quickly covert a block without having to rewrite or map out how I was going to go about something felt so liberating and offered an opportunity for me to really step back and start to get creative about how I could enhance or make a lesson more interactive. I'm also a big fan of the text to speech and the voice options are high quality. 
2. What challenges did you face when trying to get AI to produce the results you wanted? The text to graphic generation posed a couple of challenges - in some ways I got exactly what I wanted and in others either the text wasn't correct or the image didn't align stylistically - the cookies exercise was interesting because even when I specifically stated to not include anything resembling an edible 'cookie', those chocolate chip cookies snuck in. The multiple image options to choose from was helpful, however. Also, being able to download them even if we didn't want to use them in the lesson is a great option to add to your repository. 

1. Which AI Assistant feature felt most intuitive or useful to you during the practice activities?
   Instant convert. Sometimes I like to build different variations of the same content in different blocks. This makes that process so much faster.
    
2. Which editing tools (rewrite, shorten, change tone, etc.) did you find most valuable, and why?
   Rewrite and shorten. Its helpful to be able to rewrite or shorten content without having to leave the program.

Which AI Assistant feature felt most intuitive or useful to you during the practice activities?

I thought the Convert a Block feature was really easy and I can see myself using that frequently as I try to figure out the best approach for the content I'm working with. Seeing the content in a variety of blocks might enable some lightbulb moments for overall course design.

What surprised you about how AI handled text or media generation?

I was surprised that there was the ability to download Ai generated images.  This is an awesome feature and I can see using the images in Rise and Storyline, but also possibilities to download an image for another delivery method or to be the course catalog image in the LMS.  Very cool. 

Which AI Assistant feature felt most intuitive or useful to you during the practice activities?

I liked how easy it was to ground the AI using real sources in Rise, especially being able to add both documents and websites. That helped the content grow from a more authentic place, rooted in our company's policies and language instead of being generic. One thing I’d love to see is the ability for AI to generate or suggest images/screenshots directly from those sources and place them into Rise, especially for more conversion of technical/functional job guides. 

In Storyline, the tutorial practice felt similar to what I’ve used with AI Text to Talk, so the learning curve was low there, but I really liked what the AI Assistant suggested for animations. It was nice because they added engagement without a lot of extra effort. 

What challenges did you face when trying to get AI to produce the results you wanted?

The biggest challenge was keeping the Rise output lean and specific. If I wasn’t very clear about the audience, time limit, and context, the AI would drift into broad or generalized language that felt like learners could skim and skip it. 

I also know I probably won’t use the Storyline question generator much, since our SMEs need to review and approve assessment questions during the storyboard phase of our process.

For me, this AI Assistant is most valuable as a way to speed up drafting, visuals, and structure, while still leaving space for me to humanize where it matters.

I chose: 

1. Which AI Assistant feature felt most intuitive or useful to you during the practice activities?  i think adding blocks in Rise is the most intuitive and simple, then using AI really opens up whole new possibilties.  Also in Storyline, the Accessibility checker and working those items was most useful to me.  
2. What surprised you about how AI handled text or media generation?  I currently use Text to Speech in my work but love the new generation model.  I saw some comments about using phonetics and it seems we have to do that pretty often, so hopefully the new update will handle those more efficiently.

Which AI Assistant feature
I found the ability to convert blocks extremely useful for testing different looks and feels without overwriting existing content by adding below. I also appreciated being able to precisely target the source content, whether a specific block, multiple blocks within a lesson, an entire lesson, or selected documents, so the generated block stays tightly aligned to the information you need.

What surprised you
I was pleasantly surprised to work with a text generator that already had an instructional designer role built in. It made capabilities like changing tone, improving writing, and adjusting for different audiences feel native, without needing to add extra context to ensure the output was created for a learning purpose.

I absolutely loved the "key takeaways" feature!  Something I've struggled with previously is condensing content into a small section as a recap of the material covered.  Although I don't use Rise much, I will absolutely use this and copy the content into the storelines that I create!  Nice work with this!

I was really surprised to see how easily AI handled the sorting feature.  I think it's important to "test" learners as they progress through the course to ensure they're comprehending the material.  This seemed like a great way to make this happen and saves me quite a bit of time during development.

1. Which editing tools (rewrite, shorten, change tone, etc.) did you find most valuable, and why?  I appreciate these tools to give me options on making what I’ve written better.  Shorten/Lengthen are my favorite when I don’t have enough words….or need to be more concise.  I also like the Simplify Writing option!
2. What challenges did you face when trying to get AI to produce the results you wanted? My challenge is deciding which AI tool to use.  I had to slow down and pay attention to the different purposes for Edit with AI, AI Block Tools and AI Assistant

1. Which editing tools (rewrite, shorten, change tone, etc.) did you find most valuable, and why?
   
   I really liked the built in features here, more specifically the AI voice tools. It was great to be able to deal with the nuance of voices (and the AI voices have come such a long way) in the tool instead of spending time outside the tool just dealing with AI. It makes spot fixes a lot easier, too.  
2. What challenges did you face when trying to get AI to produce the results you wanted?
   
   The question I have is around Rise block templates - we use those for nearly everything we build since it's got all the branding and colors and such baked in - I'm wondering if the AI tools can work really well in those? If not, is it on the roadmap? As someone who started with SL years ago, I'm still a bit hesitant with Rise because I'm so used to a level of customization that, admittedly has gotten leaps and bounds better, but still isn't there - at least enough to save the time to use Rise vs. just building in SL. I think there's a great way for AI to help this, so less a challenge and more a thought exercise I took us all on. 

Hello, I selected the following questions:

1. Which editing tools (rewrite, shorten, change tone, etc.) did you find most valuable, and why?

I really liked the "change the audience" option. At my company, we have to write at an 8th-grade level, so selecting that option and telling the assistant to adjust to an 8th-grade level was amazing! I didn't know this was a feature, so glad I picked up on that!

1. What challenges did you face when trying to get AI to produce the results you wanted?

I found using AI to add in animations in Storyline to be cumbersome, and I think it would have just been faster to do it myself. It appears that if there are a lot of assets/objects on the screen, the AI gets confused and just lumps all the animations together.

Overall, I found the AI features in Rise much more intuitive, since you didn't have to go to the toolbar for anything. Rise is just more intuitive in general, so not a big surprise.