Testing Articulate Rise Content in LearnDash LMS

We’ve recently been working with a client who’ve been making some great stuff for their own elearning courses.

They’re using a new package in Articulate 360 called Rise, which can generate some really smart-looking responsive learning content. When speaking with us, they were curious to know how the content could be used and best presented within a LearnDash LMS platform.

We were only too happy to help, so we did some testing using the Employee Health and Wellness Sample Course from Rise in our LearnDash LMS Demo Site and this is what we found:

• For us, embedding content works absolutely fine using iframes:
• We first needed to export the content from Rise using the ‘No LMS, Web Object Only’ setting. Choosing the Tin Can option (once available) would be a good option if your LearnDash installation uses an LRS like Grassblade or Tin Canny Reporting Tool.
• Keeping the iframe at 100% width maintains the responsive nature of the content when resizing the window or using a mobile device.
• The height is dictated by what looks best in the content. Rise is meant to scroll anyway, so we chose approximately 600px.
• It’ll automatically change to iPad mode as an embed within a WordPress content area on the platform we tested. This actually looks best in our opinion, as it centres content with a Rise course menu button just above the main content window.
• As far as we can tell, there is no way to activate JavaScript functions within Rise. The buttons only link to URLs or areas within the Rise content, so the ‘Mark Complete’ button will have to remain on-screen and be clicked by the learner once they feel they are done.

It’s also possible to launch Rise content in a new window from LearnDash.

• We did this by creating a button within our LearnDash lesson and linking it to the Course Preview generated by Rise. There wasn’t an issue doing this, as the preview seems to display a final build of the Rise course hosted on Articulate’s end.
• For learners, it might seem weird that the learning suddenly takes place away from the LMS. It would be worth including a notification that a new window will open, and that once they have finished the lesson they need to return to the previous window to mark the lesson/topic as complete within LearnDash.
• Doing things this way means that no data would be captured from SCORM. If users want to launch their content in a new window and use SCORM, they would need to download the course onto their own server and launch it that way within a SCORM wrapper.

In conclusion, it’s great to see that Rise can be used to develop modern and engaging mobile responsive content that can be hosted directly inside LearnDash.

Once we have the ability to control specific functions of LearnDash such as the ‘Mark Complete’ button using our own plugin (which automatically marks lesson and topics as complete based on actions undertaken within a piece of elearning content), then it will be a massive asset. For now though, there is always still Storyline and Captivate or even H5P to achieve this.

If you’ve been busy creating content you feel would be useful in your own elearning project, please feel free to get in touch and we’ll take a look at how it can be included in a Learning Management System for you.

Update

Shortly after posting this article, Articulate announced that Rise can now support xAPI output. For more details on this click on this link