Forum Discussion
Loading RISE courses to an LMS
Hi - we are often asked by our clients to advise on using RISE to create courses and then load them under a specific LMS. There have been many, many discussions over the years here on E-learning Her...
An Experiment Using RISE and LearnDash
For anyone who may be interested, we decided that we had better try an experiment using RISE modules ourselves so we could explain and talk about the issues more knowledgably...
A lot of our work is with what I would describe as 'Commercial' LMS's i.e. their main purpose is to offer courses for sale. In this situation, detailed tracking and in-course assessment is not so important. All the LMS needs to know is that the learner has completed a given lesson or course so it can mark that fact in the learner's membership record.
If there is an assessment it is normally a separate quiz or exercise at the end of the course which can easily be handled by the LMS's own functionality and is often linked to some form of certification.
So we decided to take a look at how you might load RISE modules using an LMS without SCORM or xAPI support (of which there are quite a few in the commercial LMS space!) - meaning we would be publishing the RISE course for the web.
We have recently completed a couple of LearnDash/WordPress projects so this was an obvious one for us to try. There is xAPI support available for LearnDash - BUT it is a plug-in. LearnDash itself does not have any support for SCORM nor xAPI.
We didn't like the idea of launchng the RISE web course in a new window because of the problems of getting notification of completion back to LearnDash (not insurmountable but quite complex involving server-side coding). But I think we succeeded pretty well in overcoming the conflicting course structure and navigation issues and were able to load RISE modules successfully as lessons within a LearnDash course AND we overcame the frame size and scrolling issues to a more than acceptable extent where everyone agreed the course looked good!
We plan to write the project up as an article which we will publish here if that might help...
However, SPOILER ALERT!!... having got it working we couldn't actually see ANY advantage or reason to use RISE... We could achieve exactly the same 'look and feel' just using LearnDash. And RISE features such as flipcards, process flows, timelines etc, were achieved just as easily by using the huge number of widgets available with modern WordPress visual page builders. In fact we had a far greater choice of interactions with far greater control over the visual display elements.
Don't get me wrong, we LOVE RISE! - But would we choose to use it within LearnDash - probably not!!
