Articulate 360: Promise of Continuous Product Updates
In November 2016, Articulate launched Articulate 360, which has everything eLearning professionals need to simplify the entire course development process from start to finish.
"With our annual subscription model, we're getting highly valuable features into customers' hands faster than ever," says Articulate CEO Adam Schwartz. "We shipped over sixty new features for Articulate 360 in 2017, and there's more on the way. It's truly satisfying to continually deliver features that make our customers' jobs easier."
New Collaboration Features for Articulate 360 Teams
Articulate added exclusive product features for Articulate 360 Teams subscribers, making it easy for team members to collaborate on Storyline 360 and Rise courses. They can build a shared collection of templates, slides, and scenes that colleagues can access right from within Storyline 360. And they can work together on Rise content, creating and editing courses at the same time.
The Articulate 360 Teams plan also provides organizations with simple account management, priority support, and more.
New Accessibility Features and Workflow Enhancements in Storyline 360
Storyline 360 makes it possible for anyone to build mobile and online courses with custom interactivity. In 2017, Articulate added 15+ new features to the app, letting eLearning developers build more accessible projects and work more quickly than ever. They can create and edit closed captions in Storyline 360, customize the fonts of closed captions, and let learners toggle them on and off. And the app now includes rich tables, which communicate to screen readers how data is organized.
Course creators can also speed development by converting text to speech right in the app. And Storyline 360 does all the work to generate closed captions that are synced automatically with text-to-speech narration.
"The new text-to-speech feature is already saving me a lot of time. I love it!", says Tracy Carroll, instructional designer. "I used to have to record scratch audio to demo early versions of eLearning modules for clients, but now I can just use this automatic feature. Hooray!"
Now Storyline 360 also includes object editing and motion-path enhancements that give course creators more control over how their courses look and work. These new features let them size and position objects with pixel-perfect precision, and create flawless motion paths to control exactly how objects move around their slides. Plus, there's now a random number variable for easily adding game-like and math elements to courses.
New Ways to Do More in Rise
Rise makes it easy for anyone to build gorgeous, fully responsive courses in minutes, right from a web browser. Over 25 new features were added to Rise in 2017. For example, the Storyline block in Rise lets course developers add a custom Storyline interaction to a Rise course in seconds. This gives them the best of both worlds: custom Storyline 360 interactions in gorgeous, inherently responsive Rise courses.
Most recently, Articulate added new options for building quizzes in Rise. Course developers can choose from new question types, including multiple-response, fill-in-the-blank, and more. And with enhanced quiz-feedback options, course developers can display specific feedback depending on learners' answer choices.
Other new features in Rise include integration with Content Library and Articulate Review. Now, Rise users can add photographs and illustrations from the 2+ million assets in Content Library to their courses. They can also publish their Rise courses to Articulate Review, enabling them to gather stakeholder feedback in one place, speeding project reviews.
"Rise has become a go-to tool for all our course development needs," says Michael Culligan, Director of Certifications at Humentum. "It's easy to learn and simple to use, and it lets us get courses done really quickly. Our design and development time is the fastest it's ever been. And with consistent updates and new features, we can't wait to see what comes next."
Gorgeous New Assets in Content Library
Content Library is an ever-growing library of assets for creating beautiful courses quickly. At Articulate 360 launch, Content Library included professionally designed slide templates and characters.
In 2017, Articulate added a new template set and 15 characters, as well as 2+ million royalty-free photographs, illustrations, videos, and icons to Content Library. Course developers can access Content Library assets from within Storyline 360 and Rise without interrupting their workflow.
New Flexibility in Articulate Review
Articulate Review makes it easy to move projects through the approval process. Stakeholders can view courses and provide consolidated feedback on Articulate 360 content in a web browser, with no download required.
Articulate has released several new features this year to make the course review process even easier. For example, eLearning developers can now choose to receive a daily digest of comments, subscribe to specific comments, and even export all comments as a PDF document or CSV file for easy backup or to meet compliance requirements. And reviewers can attach files such as screenshots and course assets to their comments so everyone is on the same page.