There’s a reason we’re recommending Rise to all of our clients: it’s a clean, responsive, and more beautiful approach to eLearning. The future of eLearning is a self-directed, user-centric experience, and Rise is one of the first authoring tools to get it right. If you don’t know Articulate Rise, it’s a web-based, eLearning authoring tool that takes a component-based approach to building courses. There’s a lot to love about Rise, from its optimization on all devices to the different levels of customization.

But the real selling point is that Rise breaks the mold of traditional eLearning formats to create something new. With Rise, you build courses that use multimedia and interactivity to engage and guide learners, allowing them to tap, swipe, and slide their way through the material at their own pace. Some are calling Rise the Squarespace of eLearning, and if you’ve ever built a website with Squarespace, you’ll understand why. They both have intuitive features, pre-built templates, and absolutely no necessary backend coding so that you can focus on design and user experience instead.

Here’s what you need to know about creating self-paced courses with Rise—and what it means for the future of eLearning.

Does Self-Directed eLearning Really Work?

It’s easy to get stuck on the idea that your courses need to be voiceover-driven in order to be effective—and, for a while, that was the gold standard. But for a new generation of learners, self-paced learning provides the autonomy and flexibility to learn on-the-go and on their own terms. Today’s learner typically has a demanding schedule and a short attention span, which means your eLearning needs to be bite-sized, on-demand, and fully responsive.

But how do we know self-directed learning is the right move? We’re finding out more about the learning styles of Millennials and Generation Z, and as younger people enter the workforce, they expect to have access to independent, responsive learning experiences. Not only that, but Gen Z is the most individualized generation yet: they tend to work independently to solve problems and find out information. That means it’s more important than ever to provide practical, flexible learning that keeps up with the instant gratification mindset. And because Rise is fully responsive, users can jump in and out of lessons and find what they need whether they’re on a desktop, phone, or tablet.

But moving away from strict seat times and constrained navigation doesn’t mean your users will be any less engaged. Instead, you’re using interactive activities like videos, galleries, and sorting to engage learners and provide immediate feedback. Plus, with Rise, you can still guide learning by deploying restricted navigation, knowledge checks, and assessments.

It’s all about giving learners more control over the learning process, and studies show that it works. Chief Learning Magazine reports that 58% of organizations prefer to use on-demand learning for compliance training and 1 in 3 use mobile devices to deliver training. It’s a mobile world, we’re just living (and learning) in it.

What’s Possible with Rise

Now that you’re sold on self-directed eLearning, let’s dig into why Rise is the right platform for your content. Rise’s biggest selling point is responsive authoring, hands down. But we’ve found that developing in Rise is groundbreaking in other ways, too. Come for the responsive courses, stay for the surprisingly seamless authoring experience.

Rise manages to strike the perfect balance of pre-built lessons and customizable blocks so that you can build and combine components to create unique lessons. That’s crucial for self-directed learning, where you’re teaching concepts and skills through short, interactive lessons. The end result is consistent, comprehensive learning that’s available to your learners 24/7.

Because there’s no complex coding, Rise allows for rapid design without sacrificing style and content. At Maestro, that means we’re able to focus on performing content discovery, capturing multimedia content, and designing the best possible user experience. Our interactive designers have more space than ever to play around on the platform and innovate new ways to customize and elevate the final product.

Key Features in Rise That You Should Know

As we mentioned, a Rise course can be as interactive as you want—you choose different lesson and block types, add your text and media, and decide the order by stacking and ordering components. We’ve perfected a formula for self-guided eLearning that delivers a mix of instructional content, multimedia to support the content, and interactions to reinforce learning. While the specifics of our learning program is a much longer conversation (we’d love to share it with you!), here’s a quick rundown of our favorite features for self-paced eLearning.

Process

When you’re teaching a linear process, this lesson type allows you to guide the learner through interactive steps. Customize this pre-built lesson by adding your own title and text to each step. You can also upload your own images, video, and audio to enhance each element.

Labeled graphic

The labeled graphic is a visual learning tool that adds clickable “hotspot” markers to an image to describe its key components. Simply upload your image and click the points of the image you want to mark. Add text, images, video, or audio to each marker to further explain each point.

Interactive blocks

While there are endless block lesson types, interactive blocks showcase just how hands-on Rise lessons can be if you’re willing to get creative. Interactive blocks engage the learner by having them explore the material through interactive features like Accordion, Tabs, Sorting, and Flashcards. A media-rich experience helps capture the attention of your learners.

Assessment

Knowledge checks are a critical aspect of self-paced learning. Use Knowledge Checks to build in-module assessments that gauge competency and reinforce learning. You can use multiple choice, multiple response, fill-in-the-blank, and matching questions to create a varied experience.