One Office Party, Four Ways: Exploring Articulate's AI Training Formats

This week's challenge was so much fun! What happens if you take one training topic and run it through all four of Rise 360's new AI build formats, Guide, Interactive Video, Scenario, and Training Deck, and actually compare what comes out the other side?

So that's what I did. Same topic for all four: surviving the office holiday party (RSVPs, small talk, the buffet line, the exit strategy). Same mascot too, meet Bernard, my office party expert for the day. 🎉

Here's how each format actually performed.

Guide: video in, steps out. Feed it a video and it turns into a clean set of steps, and the writing held up well. To be honest, I could have built this simple list much faster on my own.

It is pretty basic, just a list, and like the rest, it builds a standalone course with no way to drop it into something you're already working on.

Interactive Video: same video, new checkpoints. If you already have footage, this one costs you nothing extra. It found smart, natural places to drop checkpoints right where new information landed. It also let's you edit the checkpoint which is pretty cool.

Same standalone limitation, and it's only ever as strong as the video you hand it.

Scenario: a prompt in, a conversation out. This is the one that surprised me. Two paragraphs, a goal and some context, and it built real branching logic, not just multiple choice with a coat of paint.

Fully editable after it generated too, no starting from scratch if you want to tweak a branch.

It also gave me my two favorite bloopers of the whole project, and I left both in on purpose. 😝

1. First, in his neutral pose, Bernard's mouth just isn't there. 😅 It comes back the second he smiles. 
2. Second, and better, one of the response options it wrote FOR Bernard, mid-conversation with himself, was "Heard any juicy gossip about Bernard?" The AI had him asking for the tea on his own life. I couldn't not keep that one.

Training Deck: five rules in, seven slides out. This one wants raw material, not a prompt, so I pasted in five party "rules" and stepped through a three stage wizard, Details, Outline, then Draft, with an editable checkpoint at every stage.

The visuals did not wow me, they were pretty plain. I could have create a better PowerPoint without this tool that looked much better. The editing experience was a little limited.

It also decided, entirely on its own, that our audience was "young professionals, early in their careers." I never said that anywhere, it just went with it, and honestly, sure, why not.

But I also found a real bug: four of the seven slides have a card that scrolls in Edit view but doesn't scroll in Preview or Present. That's not a cosmetic issue, it's lost content, whatever falls below the fold on those cards is just gone for anyone actually taking the deck. Worth knowing before you ship anything built this way.

The throughline across all four: every single format builds its own separate, standalone Rise course.

None of them let you generate a lesson and drop it into a course you're already building. Four for four.

It's a little ironic, since Rise already lets you drop a Storyline 360 block straight into a course. It would be great to see these four get that same treatment, generate the content, then drop it in as a lesson instead of a whole new course every time.

If I had to pick one? Scenario hand down. 🙌 No video needed, real editable branching, and nothing about it broke on me, just some Bernard's missing mouth and which made for a funny blooper. 😂

 

I built the comparison itself as a Rise course, using Articulate's AI Avatar and Code Blocks, one lesson per format with a "behind the build" walkthrough showing my actual screenshots, plus a closing verdict lesson where you can flip through pros and cons on each format before Bernard gives his own take. Link below. 👇

One Office Party, Four Ways: Exploring Articulate's AI Training Formats