Selling the value of Rise & a quick poll

Sep 21, 2022

Greetings fellow e-Learning designers! I am looking for some help in selling Rise (and the value of e-Learning) to the Talent Development Manager at my company.

Despite rolling out several Rise courses now on schedule and with rave reviews from the business, they still believe Storyline is the way to go for all online training. This stems from a belief that instructor led training is the gold standard. As such, they feel a Storyline course with narration (a person's voice) is better than Rise which is more text-based. The primary problem I'm having is that our TD Manager (and the business) also want training developed FAST and I am the only person for our global company with 4000+ employees company designing e-Learning courses.

I'm hoping you can respond to a quick poll as just one point of reference I can share to show that other e-Learning designers are using both Rise and Storyline with success?

Here is my question: Of the e-Learning courses you develop for your company or clients, what % are Rise vs. Storyline. Sample answer: 60% Rise, 40% Storyline.

Thanks in advance for chiming in!! I'm certainly open to any other thoughts or ideas to help bring our TD Manager along and get them trust me to select the best tool for the job. I've learned so much from this community and appreciate all that everyone has shared here!

2 Replies

Rise 0

over 1 year ago09/22/22 at 6:39 am (UTC)

Some 3-4 years ago i had the same issue at hand, i then started doing rise courses, motivated by the rather high cost of the Articulate360 suite and adding responsive design as the new value. Today it is a recognized standard in a +100K company.

RIse is included in the Articulate360 suite. If you have that it, it is less value to only use storyline for most basic stuff.
Its like buying Adobe creative suite and only use photoshop.
You can add storyline objects to your rise course. There is strength in finding the balance in combining custom interactions from storyline and rapid course development, all in rise.
If you create that type of example for your stakeholders, i think it can show the Suite has untapped potential and then they will leave the decisions on what works for training up to your discretion from there on. Still hoping they get involved in all the the course design specifications of course.

But in the end, Rise is true responsive design for any device, Storyline is currently not.
Combing the two is something fairly unique in value.

I also think your L&D people are right about voice etc.. But not in the sense that it excludes rise and the value that the tool brings to the e-learning development process and the user experience. Rise is growing in features and the expectations of the future with rise is why we are just about to re-new for a multi year Articulate360 contract. some 60+ licenses.

So in the answer i cant say 100% rise nor can i say 100% storyline.
But i can say 100% Articulate 360 suite.

Hope this helps your situation.

Judy Nollet
Hero

over 1 year ago09/22/22 at 1:06 pm (UTC)

Most of the courses I develop are in Storyline, because they require more programming control than Rise offers. But for simple courses that require fast turnaround, Rise is a great choice.

FYI: The vast majority of the courses I develop for my clients do not use audio narration. Why?

Narration extends the development timeline, because the audio script has to be completely approved before the recording session, which has to be done before the audio files can be added to the course, which has to be done before any animations can be synced to the audio...
Narration is more expensive. In addition to the cost of the extra development time, there's the cost of a professional narrator. Plus the cost of the extra time each employee needs to complete the course by listening to the content vs. reading the content.
- Suppose the 4000 employees in your company are required to take a given course. And suppose that, with narration, it takes just an extra 5 minutes to complete vs the course without narration. 5 min x 4000 employees = 20,000 min = 333 person hours.
Narration makes it more complicated to update the course later. Can you get the same narrator? Will the new audio clips sound different somehow, potentially distracting the learner?
Yes, using text-to-speech can alleviate some of the above issues. But does anyone like listening to those automated voices?
Most importantly: Do the learners really want to listen to a narrator when they could read the content much quicker? Is the audio actually helping them learn?
- If the narrator is reading the same or similar text to what's on the slide, narration actually increases cognitive load, which decreases learning. (Well, except in a few cases, such a someone taking a course that's not in their native language.)
- Narration is helpful for situations in which the narrator is describing actions that are happening on the screen. For example, if the slide is showing machine parts moving or software being used, it decreases cognitive load when the learner can watch that happen while listening to the description (instead of trying to read text on the side while watching the action).

Bottom line: Some ILTs are wonderfully effective. But ILT in which the instructor basically reads the text that's on each slide isn't a "gold standard." The success of training (instructor-led or online) depends on the instructional design. That design should meet the needs of the learners using the capabilities of the delivery platform.