Make Over Your Rise 360 Course in 4 Easy Steps With Themes
Rise 360 has always been a fantastic tool for creating courses fast. And with the templates and other flexible options, even people without graphic design experience can feel confident that their Rise 360 projects will always look polished and professional. That’s why we’re so excited about Rise 360 themes. Themes give you even more ways to put your unique spin on the look and feel of your Rise 360 courses. And just like everything else about Rise 360, the themes feature makes creating beautifully designed courses easy—no graphic design skills needed. So let’s take a closer look at four easy steps you can follow to refresh your overall course design with a new theme, pique your learners’ interest with cover pages and lesson headers, reinforce your branding, and customize the course navigation experience. Step 1: Update the Overall Course Design With a New Theme The easiest way to give your course’s visual design a little facelift is to choose from the three prebuilt themes included in Rise 360. These themes are great for setting the overall look and feel of your project in one fell swoop. Let’s look at how to choose a theme and the available theme options, below. Choosing a Theme Start by opening any existing Rise 360 course on your Rise 360 dashboard. Select Theme in the upper right corner, and then click Change Theme. Rise 360 includes three professionally designed, ultra-stylish themes—Rise, the classic theme you’ve come to know (but with a few more customization options), plus two brand-new ones: Apex and Horizon. Following is a quick overview of each theme. Rise Our original theme, Rise, always looks modern and clean—a tried-and-true design choice that never goes out of style. Apex For a bold, contemporary, and striking design with angular finishes, choose Apex. Horizon When you want to give your course an elegant, sharp, and stylish makeover—complete with understated flourishes—Horizon is a great choice. They’re all so beautiful, right? Not sure which theme works best for your content? We’ve got you covered! Check out 3 Ways to Use Themes to Tailor Your Rise 360 Projects for some pro pointers. Once you’ve decided on a theme for your project, click to select it and you’ll see it applied to your project in the adjacent preview pane. Being able to preview your theme choice is handy because if you’re not in love with it, you can simply click another one. And if it’s love at first sight, click Save to apply it to your project. While you can use each theme as is, you also have loads of options for customizing key theme elements such as the cover page, lesson headers, and other features of the user interface, like colors, fonts, and navigation. We’ll explore some of these customization options in the next few steps. Step 2: Grab Learners’ Attention With a Custom Cover Page and Lesson Headers A cover page is your first opportunity to grab a learner’s attention, so why not customize it to fit the course topic or your company branding and really make it count? Select Cover Page from the menu and pick a stylish layout. If you’re opting to add a course image to your cover page, you can upload your own image or browse the wide selection images available in Content Library 360, which is built right into Rise 360. Pro Tip: You can also crop images directly in Rise 360. That means no hassling with a separate image editing app to tailor your course images to your project. To make your theme branded, upload your logo too. Customizing the Lesson Header option is another nice way to draw learners in and direct their attention to your content. You can choose from a variety of header designs or customize them with your own color or image. You can even adjust lesson headers to make them taller or shorter to create more or less white space, as you can see in the GIF above. Step 3: Reinforce Your Brand Identity With Custom Colors and Fonts The design choices we’ve walked through so far are quick but powerful ways to transform your course, but they’re really just the tip of the creative iceberg! You can also brand your course with custom colors and fonts to make sure it more fully aligns with your brand guidelines. Colors You can choose the Colors option to customize course accents like the menu and progress bar. Rise 360 makes picking eye-catching colors easy with curated options you can apply with a single click. But what if you need to bring in your official brand shades? No problem. Choose the Custom feature and select any color you’d like. Fonts Another easy way to brand your Rise 360 projects is to customize the fonts. Choose the Fonts option to find the perfect typeface for your project. Not sure where to start? Try the Recommended pairings—a fast way to make sure your headings and body fonts go together perfectly. For even more flexibility, click More to browse a selection of pre-installed options. And if you want to use your official brand fonts, just click Manage Custom Fonts to upload the ones you need and use them throughout your course. Step 4: Complete the Transformation With Custom Navigation and Button Styles You’ve got the cover page, lesson headers, colors and fonts fine-tuned. The final step in making over your Rise 360 course is to customize course navigation and button styles. Navigation In Rise 360, you’ve always had the option to show, hide, or disable the sidebar navigation. And now we’ve added more ways to customize course navigation so you can create the perfect experience for your learners. To start exploring your options, choose Navigation. Both Compact and Overlay navigation are great for making your content the star of the show. Choose Compact navigation to tuck your lesson menu away in a corner, where it can be quickly expanded with a click when learners need it. Another great option is Overlay navigation. When learners need to view the menu, they simply click the ☰ (hamburger) icon and the menu overlays the lesson, filling the screen. Love keeping things familiar? The always reliable Sidebar menu is a great choice with more options to choose from. Don’t want to include a navigation menu at all? No problem. You can remove it entirely—just as you’ve always been able to do in Rise 360. Buttons Want to continue customizing your course? Don’t forget about button options! Pick the button color that’s right for your course or branding. You can even refine your Previous and Next buttons by making them full width or floating—or you can remove them entirely. It’s totally up to you! Want to see how themes and custom settings can be combined for different effects? Check out the following example course. We present the same content three different ways and with minimal customizations so you can see for yourself. Explore Horizon Explore Apex Explore Rise Customizations: compact navigation, large header height Customizations: overlay navigation, small header height, custom color Customizations: sidebar navigation, medium header height, custom color Wrap-Up Not only does the themes feature give you a host of new ways to express yourself, wow your learners, and brand your Rise 360 content, it’s also streamlined the course creation process by consolidating theme settings all in one place—right at the top of the authoring environment in Rise 360. With so many options to customize your project's look and feel, you can rest assured knowing that whichever professionally designed theme you choose, your course will look fantastic on any device. And all of these thoughtful features and enhancements mean Rise 360 just keeps making it easier to create stunningly unique and stylish courses your learners will love. For more tips and inspiration on how you can start using themes in your e-learning, check out these helpful resources: Quickly Create Uniquely Stunning Courses with Rise 360 Themes 3 Ways to Use Rise 360 Themes to Tailor Your Projects How to Brand Your Rise 360 Course Want to try the new Rise 360 themes but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial! And come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.Personalization Principle: Speaking to Instead of at Your Learners
We’ve all been there: the moment you realize you’ve stopped paying attention and have no idea what you just read or heard. So you go back and reread or retake or review, but it keeps happening. Maybe you’re just distracted ... or maybe there’s another explanation. The vast majority of nonfiction texts and informational materials, including e-learning courses, are written in a formal style. Why? Because that’s how we’re taught to write in school. In their book E-Learning and the Science of Instruction, Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer suggest that people try harder to understand something when they’re engaged in a conversation. It seems our brains are hardwired to pay closer attention when there’s a social element in the mix. They call this the personalization principle. In sum, it states that favoring a conversational writing style and incorporating virtual coaches in e-learning courses can get learners to pay closer attention and retain more of what they learn. Let’s look at a couple of the quick and easy ways Clark and Mayer suggest for applying the personalization principle to e-learning courses. Use First and Second Person (“We” and “You”) An easy way to take your writing from informal to formal is by replacing the article “the” with the personal pronouns “we” or “you,” like in the following example: Formal: When exercising, the heart rate increases to supply more food and oxygen to the muscles. Informal: When we exercise, our heart rate increases to supply more food and oxygen to our muscles. Can you believe what a difference that small change makes? The first example sounds dry and academic, while the second feels more relatable. Ask Questions and Direct Comments to Learners Another way you can make your course sound more conversational is by addressing your learner personally. For example, instead of jumping right into an explanation, start with something like: “Did you know that …?” or “Now let’s take a look at …” Favor Polite Language over Direct Language The results of one study showed that when you use polite language instead of direct language, learners perform better. This was found to be especially true of learners whose prior knowledge of the subject matter was low. You might want to keep that in mind next time you’re writing feedback for questions in your next e-learning course. Instead of saying “Sorry, that’s incorrect. Try again!” you might encourage with “Sorry, that’s incorrect. Would you like to give it another try?” Use Human Voices for Narration You might be tempted to use a text-to-speech application to create voice-over audio for your course. I get it! Text-to-speech makes it super fast and easy to create and maintain voice-over audio. However, Clark and Mayer’s research shows that people learn better when listening to a human voice instead of a machine-generated voice. So next time you consider using text-to-speech narration, be sure to think about how it might impact your course’s effectiveness. Include a Visual Narrator Clark and Mayer also suggest that adding a visual narrator can simulate a person-to-person interaction and increase learner engagement. The idea is that learners who can visualize the person speaking feel more connected, as if they’re having a conversation with someone. They might even see the narrator as a guide of sorts, so they feel less isolated and more comfortable in the learning process. Wrap-Up Although personalization is a highly effective technique for increasing learner engagement, be careful not to overdo it. As they say in their book, “Good instructional design involves adding just the right amount of social cues to prime a sense of social presence in the learner, without adding so much that the learner is distracted.” Want to learn more about Clark and Mayer’s principles? Check out these articles: Multimedia Principle: Adding Graphics to Words Improves Learning Contiguity Principle: Keep Graphics & Related Text Together Redundancy Principle: Should You Duplicate Narrated Text On Screen? Coherence Principle: Less Material for Better Learning If you enjoyed this article, remember to subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest e-learning inspiration and insights directly in your inbox. You can also find us on LinkedIn and X (Formerly Twitter). And if you have questions, please share them in the comments.
