What is Rise?

Let’s face it, creating, distributing, and tracking online training hasn’t been easy for many organizations. For one, you need specialized apps for creating courses—and you need people who are skilled in using those apps. And then, you need an entirely separate system for hosting online courses (known as a learning management system—or LMS, for short). The LMS also needs to be administered by someone with special skills. 

If this all sounds overly complicated, you’re right! It’s an expensive, clumsy mishmash of technology and people. And, in the end, you could still wind up with online courses that don’t play well with your LMS or aren’t very enjoyable for your learners.

Why does it matter if learners enjoy online training? Well, in one survey, more than a third of learners said they found online courses boring, and more than 75% said that learning important procedures and regulations was a tedious experience. When people are turned off and tuning out, it’s not exactly a recipe for boosting their performance, now is it?

From dull, droning courses that learners dread taking, to the confusing, cumbersome assortment of clunky systems and apps for creating and sharing online courses, online training, as we know it, is stuck in the past. And that’s too bad because there are some amazing benefits of putting training online. But those benefits aren’t fully realized when course creators and learners are hamstrung by outdated tech.

Thankfully, there’s a better way to do online training: Rise. Rise is the all-in-one training system that makes training easy to create, enjoyable to take, and simple to manage. Let’s take a closer look at why Rise is all you need to create, distribute, track, and manage online training people actually love.

Easy to create

Before Rise, creating custom online training usually involved purchasing, installing, and maintaining multiple pieces of software—then hiring people with expertise in using all that software. The only other options for creating online courses were buying off-the-shelf content and paying to have it customized for your company’s needs, or hiring a freelance designer or boutique firm to create fully customized courses from scratch. All of these options were expensive and time-consuming. 

But now, there’s Rise, which Rebecca Fritzson of Frito-Lay North America says, “has changed the way we think about training development.” And because Rise is an all-in-one training system, all you need is a web browser to create online training courses. There are no apps to download and install, no upgrades to buy. Best of all, Rise is so simple to use that anyone can create a course in minutes. You and your subject matter experts can even partner to create courses in record time with the amazing collaboration features in Rise.

Not only is building courses in Rise super fast, but it’s also super-flexible. You can build training from scratch if you want. Or, you can kick-start your new training by using hundreds of beautiful prebuilt, fully customizable lessons, gorgeous course templates, and inspiring example courses that you can customize to your heart’s content.

Whichever path you take to create training, building lessons in Rise is easy with learning blocks. They’re modular components for things like text, media, interactive activities, and knowledge checks that you stack and arrange in any order. To keep learners engaged, you can add interactive timelines, labeled graphics, sorting activities, and branching scenarios that include rich media like audio, video, and embedded content from the web.

Want to test your learner’s understanding of the training material? No problem. Just add a quiz to your course to track their score, or sprinkle in knowledge check blocks as low-pressure, unscored refreshers throughout your lessons.

Now that we’ve talked about how Rise makes it easy to create engaging courses, let’s discuss the many ways Rise makes online training enjoyable for learners to take.

Enjoyable to take

Have you ever taken an online course that looked like a PowerPoint resurrected from the 1990s? Or, maybe you’ve struggled to navigate a course with an interface that just didn’t work well on your tablet or mobile phone? When an app experience, learning or otherwise, is frustrating and outdated, people end up remembering how annoyed they were, not what they learned (or rather, didn’t learn). 

Today’s learners need a simple, enjoyable user experience from start to finish—one that minimizes distractions so they can fully engage with the content. That means removing some of the common barriers to engaging online training: flashy animations, droning narrators, and clunky navigation that doesn’t work on mobile devices.

That’s where Rise comes in. Rise courses look modern and gorgeous and are intuitive to navigate. With beautiful, vibrant images and subtle animation effects, your learners will appreciate having an online training experience that’s more like browsing a modern website than being held hostage by a narrated PowerPoint. 

And because Rise makes it so easy for you to add engaging interactions to your courses, your learners will actually look forward to taking their training. Challenging, realistic branching scenarios, for example, give them a safe space to learn by doing—something that 51% of learners say they find motivating and engaging. Similarly, sorting activities give learners an inherently inviting, hands-on way to practice decision-making. Learners simply click and drag words or images into categories to see immediate feedback on their choices. It’s so satisfying!

Rise courses are also fully responsive, which means they adapt seamlessly and automatically to any device a learner is using. Learners can take Rise courses from anywhere—a laptop, a tablet, or from their mobile phone—and get a great learning experience. This makes Rise an ideal option for deskless and remote workers who may rely more heavily on their mobile devices. But really, Rise courses are perfect for anyone who needs to learn, wherever they are … in the breakroom, at their work stations, or even on their morning train commute.

Today’s learners expect you to make training easier for them—not by making training that’s easy, but by making training easier to take! And that’s yet another area where Rise really shines. With Rise, your company can offer learners a browsable library of online training that fits their professional development needs and piques their interest. Rise empowers your learners by putting great training right at their fingertips with a modern, intuitive learning experience that’s frustration-free and mobile-friendly. What’s not to love about that?

Simple to manage

So far, we’ve been talking about what it’s like to create and take a Rise course. But what about managing all this training? In the past, you’ve needed a separate LMS platform and an LMS administrator to manage your training. But since Rise is an all-in-one training system, you create, deploy, and analyze learner performance all in one spot. No separate LMS is needed!

And, without a separate LMS to buy and manage, there’s never any compatibility issues with Rise courses. You and your learners get one streamlined experience that just works from start to finish.

In fact, here’s a quick look at how simple it is to share finished Rise courses with your learners: 

Of course, you also need to measure the impact of your training once you’ve rolled it out. Again, with an LMS, you’d have to work with your admin to get access to learner reports. Most LMS reports are complicated to get, and even more complicated to interpret. 

By contrast, anyone with the right permissions can easily access Rise reports. Plus, Rise reports are super simple to view, easy to understand, and also powerful. You can look at various dimensions of training and performance to draw conclusions about the impact of your courses. 

Here’s a high-level overview of the types of reports in Rise:

• Activity reports give you an easy way to see who’s taking courses and when.
• Learner reports help you see how your learners are progressing with and performing on their training.
• Course reports give you a deeper understanding of how learners are engaging with individual courses.
• And learning path reports give you a bird’s-eye view of all the learning paths in your account, how learners are progressing through them, and how each course and learner is performing. 

With Rise, managing and analyzing your training is as simple and enjoyable as creating and taking it.

Summing it up

There’s something for everyone to love about an all-in-one online training system like Rise. For organizations, Rise is an elegant and cost-effective alternative to the costly, multi-app approach for training programs. For course creators, Rise is an easy-to-use, web-based app that makes building beautiful courses quick and fun. For learners, Rise provides a simplified, multi-device learning experience that’s actually enjoyable. And for managers, Rise offers easy insight into training engagement and effectiveness. 

Read More