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NeilForrest-ea7's avatar
NeilForrest-ea7
Community Member
11 days ago

Using AI Assistant in a Rise Course Template

Hi All,

Has anyone established if you can use the AI Assistant as part of pre-developed course template.

I can see that you can use it within lessons themselves, so what I'm looking for is a way whereby you can upload the source documents for a new development, which retains all the course template features i.e company logos, brand colours etc... From what I can see, I don't think that's an option.

My impression when this feature was first made public knowledge was that we could upload source documents and the AI Assistant would take the information contained within those documents and turn them into lessons, for us as Developers to then refine further if required.

As an example, I've just uploaded a PowerPoint, and all it did was provide a suggested course title and created a course outline based on that title. It was then down to me to create lessons within each of those sections and add content, with none of the information from the PowerPoint anywhere to be seen.

Am I missing something?

  • DarrenNash's avatar
    DarrenNash
    Community Member

    I had the same expectation. I already fed this back to Articulate. It all seems to be geared towards non learning development experts and meant for novices. Same with Storyline 360, it does not provide anything better or quicker, just different. I would not expect anyone in the learning world to open a blank Storyline file and start typing prompts and hopes it creates something. With Rise I was very disappointed so far. Rise is already intended to be used by none design or development experts, I get that, so this seems to be trying to dumb it down a bit more. Scary that Articulate is basically encouraging this. AI struggles as the moment with learning standards and it is not accurate at all. I imported a PPT with 30 slides as a test and it still requires you to either give it a prompt or base it on text already in the lesson or the imported file, but you still need to tell it, what text in the file you want referenced. It will then create text that is not actually referenced at all. It is already quicker once the source material has been collected by yourself. Not sure the point of generating a block based on text already in the lesson...its already done. As others were expecting, like the application Didask, I would expect that we can upload several files such a PPT's Word docs etc and then, based on the content uploaded, ask through prompts, to provide solutions of lessons or even a complete course structure based on Learning Objectives we provide. I would also be interested to know the source of the AI content for the text and visuals.

  • I've just used the Create New > Course > Start with AI. Its a waste of time. I filled in the fields, uploaded a PowerPoint file and all it did was write a course description and lesson titles. No ne of the lessons were populated with content. It would have been quicker for me to do manually.

    • TomKuhlmann's avatar
      TomKuhlmann
      Staff

      I can see why it seemed like it didn't do anything for you. Essentially, the AI outline will create a lesson and topics, but it can't really build out all the content because it doesn't know what block type you want for the content topics in the lesson.

      Watch the video I added below to show how to flesh out the lessons. Once AI creates the lesson outline and topics. You go into the lesson, select AI blocks and you'll see the starter topics and can work from there.

  • LearningConsB's avatar
    LearningConsB
    Community Member

    Same here. I always understood, I will be able to transform whole PPT into a Rise-Course. But no, just an outline and for every block I have to upload source material. However, it does not even take photos or graphics out of the presentation.

  • It certainly doesn't seem any quicker from a brand new development perspective, does it? I can see it being quite useful in courses already developed and just quickly trying to present new content in a different way e.g. converting something into an accordion or tabbed interaction, without the copying and pasting or potentially changing the tone of something

    That first showcase of the feature, in a webinar with Kerry Munz, really gave the impression of uploading source documents, course is created and developers go in and finesse according to individual/organisational requirements. 

    That video no longer exists, but this one has the demo that was used:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiWKbxqtKKI

    I've either completely misunderstood that initial video, or the initial idea behind it has drastically changed. Either way, I'm a bit disappointed right now, but once I get into it a bit more and use the functionality in a course I've already developed, my opinion may change?

    • DarrenNash's avatar
      DarrenNash
      Community Member

      Looks like another quack video with no experience or knowledge of Adult Learning or Learning Standards and Models. It was shocking to be honest. Generating Learning objectives from Material? Without the users in mind? Another example of lazy misuse of "AI". The reliance of AI is worrying, it is going to be worse than the current generation who cannot do mental maths for small numbers and they need to take out their phones to add up 10 + 7 + 6. (Actual situation when I asked this when giving a lecture). also, the video shows the function to convert text to an AI video....I do not have that option so I cannot test it.

  • NeilForrest-ea7 (and everyone else). Good questions. 

    First, let me clear up some confusion. The pre-release videos were based on earlier designs and some of what was shown has changed. This often happens with software development. We apologize for any confusion from the previous demos.

    Looking at the released features, I recorded a demo where I walked through some source content and how I'd get started to build out the course. I start with an old OSHA ladder safety PowerPoint file and I changed all reference of ladder to zizbo to show that the AI is pulling from the PPT file and not generic ladder information.

    Link to demo walkthrough.

    Once you walk through the initial process with AI, you can go into a lesson and only work from source content to build all sorts of blocks. In my demo you'll see how easy it is.

    A couple of other considerations:

    • If you have imagery and whatnot in PPT, the AI won't extract those. However, I show how to quickly access all of the PPT media which will make it easy for you to insert into your course.
    • You are the owner of the authoring process and can make the content anything you want. You can make it as instructionally sound as you want and add any objectives you need. The AI truly is only assisting the process and I think speeding up a lot of the block creation.

    Also, check out some of the tutorials and videos we have in training to see what's there and how the features work. There's even a hands-on practice video.

    • NeilForrest-ea7's avatar
      NeilForrest-ea7
      Community Member

      Hi Tom,

      Thanks for jumping in to provide your insights. The video seems useful, so I'll give that a try on an upcoming project and go from there 👍

      I understand your comments around changes during software development, but as some feedback for Articulate, there was such a gap in communication between that initial video being shown and what has actually been released, you can see why some members of the community might feel a little frustrated. It's an MVP, that will naturally evolve and improve over time, but the comms and roll out could have been handled a lot better, in my personal opinion.

      Your demo certainly gives a more accurate representation of how it can be used, so that's something I can draw on at least as part of the free trial, so thank you.

    • DarrenNash's avatar
      DarrenNash
      Community Member

      Sorry, but I have been testing this extensively for the past 3 days and not getting anywhere near the same results. It would be useful if you also showed us by reference the PPT content. Also, pulling the information from the Notes section is also crucial as that is where the bulk of the information should be as that is the speaker notes where they explain more than what is on the slides. The slides should only be showing supporting text and images and be minimalist, as what the speaker is saying is more important. Dumping large amounts of text onto the slide is not the proper process for good slide design. Anyway, I copied and pasted the test from the notes onto the slide, just as a test anyway. I got the same structure prompts for the lesson sections, picked one and chose paragraph. The information did not use anything from the PPT. So maybe it might be useful to provide instructions on "Building a PPT to work in Articulate AI" or something similar. I also tried a Word doc and it pulled nothing from the word doc.

      • TomKuhlmann's avatar
        TomKuhlmann
        Staff

        DarrenNash Regarding your Word docs and your tests, I'll have someone from support connect with you to figure out why it's not working for you as expected. 

        As far as my demo, I literally just opened an old PPT file I had and changed ladder to zizbo. That's it. Here's the PPT I used for the demo. https://a.cl.ly/yAueynYA 

        In general the more content you have the better, so I wouldn't rely on just the PowerPoint for the exact reason you mentioned. I'd also extract all the notes, easy to do in PowerPoint using the export or print feature or just copy and paste into a text document.

        As far as template, I don't think you need one. Just get the content ingested. Personally, I like having just text so for a real project I'd get all of my PPT stuff moved into a text document which you can do pretty easily.