Here's how to use Articulate's new responsive e-learning tool outside of the cloud

Last week Articulate came out with a slew of new tools and updates to old ones. I love the E-Learning Heroes Community and all that Articulate stands for but I was really disappointed to see that all of the new tools I want to use are located in the cloud.

Whenever using any cloud based e-learning authoring tool that stores data in the cloud you absolutely need to get it approved by your company's information security team or your client's information security team. They will thank you. While there are many positives to using cloud based software you should always protect your company/client's data and know the risks.

I was especially pumped to try out Articulate's new responsive e-learning tool: Rise (that just so happens to be one of their tools in the cloud.) I had one last hope for Rise and that was that the output would be editable for me. I was hoping that if I could not add content in the cloud, that I could at least edit it in the source code.

What's Rise?

Here's how to edit the content

I used Base64 (UTF-8) to decode the string. I made my edits to the code and then re-encoded it using Base64 again. There is also Base64 software out there. I suggest asking your IT department to suggest software.

Here's how to edit the content to make it more readable/easier to edit

If you want to take it one step further and make the decoded JSON more readable for editing you can unminify the JSON to edit it, reminify the JSON, and then re-encode it using Base64. There are lots of tools you can use to do this with either your command line, text editor, or with software.

I'm not entirely sure why they couldn't just leave the JSON instead of encoding everything but I'm not a dev, so I have no idea why they chose to go this route.

Is there an easier way to do this? I'd love for you to chime in if you know how.

What do I think of Articulate 360 and Rise?

I love the modern look/feel of the e-learning you will create with Rise.

Rise is for sure responsive and it's supposed to be.

Rise is super easy to use which for me is a positive and negative. I want a tool that challenges me and builds my skills, this is definitely not that. Sometimes I do have projects that need to be finished extremely quickly and this would fit for that.

I'm really disappointed in the constraints of what can be customized in Rise i.e. there are only a few fonts you can choose from, quiz question types, icon types, and not too many layout options, or the ability to do branching. That's really just for starters but we need to remind ourselves that this is a new tool that they will hopefully expand upon and allow for more customization.

xAPI is not currently supported but is coming soon. This makes me super happy, as I am trying to make this the last year I use SCORM. I'm glad more e-learning companies are adding in the option for xAPI.

Let's talk about the Content Library. The templates are modern and slick looking. I think I would use them for inspiration for design. I'm not a fan of any of the characters in the Content Library. I really wish the illustrations looked more modern (less MS Word clipart-y) and there were images of people more casually dressed.

The overall price for Articulate 360 is pretty steep considering that you have to pay over 500 USD per year and you may not be able to use all of the tools.

Will I be buying Articulate 360? I purchased Storyline 2 for myself so that I could build my skills in developing e-learning and share tutorials with the community. Many folks have asked if I freelance. I do not. I most likely won't be purchasing Articulate 360 due to the price but I will try to bring you 1 or 2 more tutorials before my trial ends.

-Mel