creating branching by linking other rise courses from within an opening rise course

Ideally, because it's more custom and uses adaptive branching, I recommend Storyline. Rise is great for the assembly of content and has limited branching capabilities.

• If you are going to use Rise, you can leverage the scenario blocks, and create multiple scenes you can jump to. There is some nuance in validating the selection and hitting a continue button to jump to a new scene. But with that in mind, you can jump all over.
• Button stacks can jump from lesson to lesson, thus you can build the scenario as a sequence of lessons and the button stacks become the choice mechanism that branches to the lesson. If you use this, you need to probably disable the menu so people don't see the structure.