ICYMI: New ways to connect, share, and earn recognition!
In case you missed it, we recently launched ELH Rewards, a new program that recognizes the ways you help make this community better. Want to earn points and participate? Start by opting in to ELH Rewards. Check out two opportunities to earn bonus points this month: October Monthly Mission 🧠Complete four community actions by October 31—welcome someone new, show some appreciation, start a conversation, and share an idea sparked by Articuland—to earn 10 bonus points. Shout-out to AndreaGentis​, KarlMuller​, JenLynnRusso​, JudyNollet​, AndrewBlemings-​, @ronald-hicks, @ISa, LuisCGreer​, and Thomas_Shayon​ for diving right in and completing the September mission. Your 10 points have been awarded! Nova Expedition ✨ Try Nova, share what you discover, and connect with other members’ experiments. Complete the expedition by October 23 to earn a Nova Expedition badge and 30 bonus ELH Rewards points. Shout-out to AndrewBlemings-​, RoBeKayBee​, Mrigna2611​, Thomas_Shayon​, and BryanPechtl​ for already sharing their experiments. There are some really great lessons to learn from their threads! Looking forward to another great month full of community connections! And while you are here, October is one of my favorite times of year, so I have to ask: are you bringing in the new month with spooky season 👻, cozy season 🍂, or a little of both?Block Course Progress When Offline
Hi everyone, I’m looking for advice on how to handle internet connection loss in both Rise 360 and Storyline 360. Our requirement is that if the learner loses their internet connection while taking a SCORM course, the course should immediately stop and prevent the learner from progressing. Once the internet connection is restored, the learner should be able to continue from where they left off. The main goal is to make sure learners cannot continue through mandatory/compliance training while offline, as the LMS data will also be used for reporting and audit purposes. What settings or development would be required to achieve this in: Rise 360 Storyline 360 Is there a native setting for this, or would it require custom JavaScript or modification of the published SCORM package? Thanks in advance for any advice or examples.Articulate + Thinkific: what does your workflow look like?
Do you create with Articulate and publish through Thinkific? I’d love to hear what that workflow looks like for you. What are you creating in Articulate, and how does Thinkific fit into how you deliver it to your learners? Plus, if you have any tips or things you wish you’d known when getting started, I’m sure others would love to hear those, too!An eLearning Course May Be Teaching More Than You Intended
After many years in instructional design and eLearning, I’ve come to question something we often take for granted about learning. We tend to think of it in simple terms: The learner learned it. The learner didn’t. The course worked. The course failed. But I don’t think learning works that way. People always learn something. The more important question is: What are they learning? Consider a poorly designed eLearning course. An employee attends a course because they genuinely want to learn. But the content is difficult to follow, the activities feel disconnected, and the experience becomes frustrating. The course doesn’t help with the problems they actually face at work. We might conclude that the learner simply didn’t get much out of it. But they may have learned something very different from what we intended: “I could have spent this time getting my work done.” Or “eLearning is a waste of time.” That is still learning. It’s just not the learning outcome we intended. And if that happens repeatedly, something else happens. We spend a great deal of effort trying to motivate learners, get them interested, and hook them into the learning experience. But several poor learning experiences can work in the opposite direction. Learners may become more guarded and less receptive, even when they are later required to learn. There is an interesting example in Taiwan. The government has invested heavily in eLearning for public servants, offering a large number of courses across different topics and allowing employees to choose based on their needs and interests. There are many good courses among them, but the quality is mixed. In 2018, a proposal was submitted on Taiwan’s Public Policy Participation Platform calling for the abolition of the eLearning program for public servants. One of the complaints was that requiring 20 to 40 hours of eLearning each year was a waste of time with little effect. The proposal received nearly 8,000 endorsements in just three days. What interests me is not whether the program was good or bad. It’s this: If people repeatedly experience learning that feels ineffective, what are they learning about learning itself? Maybe: “This isn’t worth my time.” And that may be a bigger problem than one ineffective course. A poor course doesn’t simply fail to teach what we intended. It may teach learners to distrust the learning experience itself. So perhaps we need to ask a different question when we talk about learning effectiveness: Not just, “Did they learn what we wanted them to learn?” But: “What else did they learn from the experience?”Rise Backup and Restorateion
I have seen some of the older discussions on creating pdfs and web files for backing up Rise courses. I assume there isnt another method to address this; am I right? So, let's say I create the web backup, win PowerBall and quit my company without making anyone a collaborator on my courses. With the web files, can my colleague import the web files back into Rise? Or is there another technique they could use, other than rebuilding the course one piece at a time?What Is One Small Course Design Change That Improved Learner Engagement?
I'm always looking for practical ways to make e-learning courses more engaging. Recently, I've been experimenting with shorter content sections, knowledge checks, and interactive scenarios. For those who build courses regularly, what is one small change you've made that had a noticeable impact on learner engagement or completion rates? Was it related to course structure, visual design, interactions, accessibility, or something else? I'd love to hear about real-world experiences and lessons learned.How are you handling certificate delivery?
Certificate delivery keeps coming up, so I wanted to share the approach I settled on after trying a few and hear how others are doing it. The recurring problem: a learner finishes a course, and you want them to get a certificate that (a) looks exactly like the slide you designed, (b) lands in their inbox automatically, and (c) is recorded somewhere you can look up later. Native print-to-PDF and LMS certificates got me part of the way, but not all three. What I ended up building: On the certificate slide, the Send button runs an Execute JavaScript trigger that posts the slide to a small backend endpoint. The backend renders that actual slide, so the PDF is pixel-perfect; no rebuilding the layout server-side and hoping the fonts match. It emails the PDF to the learner over SMTP, and logs every issue to a database with a simple admin dashboard (search, re-send, download). It runs on ordinary cPanel hosting - no monthly third-party service and no per-certificate fees - and one backend serves multiple courses. How's everyone else handling this native download, LMS-issued certs, Google Sheets/Zapier, a paid service? Curious what's working for you. I do this kind of Storyline-to-backend integration, so happy to go deeper on any of it if it's useful.
