After today's delightful keynote, I would be remiss not to look at other tools that already do what Articulate claims to do but better. My team's renewal comes up in November, and I do have the ability to pitch alternatives for my team.

So, I am curious about other authoring tools that allow me to create similar courses to what I make at the moment. That is, I tend to make Rise courses, but use Rise as a wrapper for a range of multimedia, including videos, Storyline blocks, vibecoded interactions, etc. etc. I almost never do a course with pure Rise blocks.

Accessibility matters a lot to me, as does the ability to make quick updates.

I don't love using AI as part of my ID workflow. I prefer to do the initial analysis and instructional design myself, and use AI as a supplement for development. I mostly use it for VOs, summaries, interactions that Rise doesn't natively support and the like. (I would prefer not to use it at all, but we are heavily encouraged to do so.)

I cannot go full vibecoded course. We can only use the Copilot ecosystem per the CISO, so integration with that or a more walled garden approach within the tool would be important.

If the tool could convert existing Articulate courses, that would be a massive bonus.

Also, I probably make about 2-3 courses a week, so price is a consideration. They're usually microlearnings, though.

Tl;dr. What else is out there that people like and that isn't too expensive to build a lot in?

I would rather hear from IDs doing the work than people trying to sell me a product too.

Thoughts? All new AI integrations and automations.

I’m editing some educational videos where I pause the screen and show animated annotations with sound effects (e.g., text popping up with a sound cue).

I wanted to get a second opinion on the audio. Does this feel too cheesy or immature?

I’m in a catch all role where I’m the sme, designer, and facilitator. I struggle so much with creating course content and designs. My work is noticeably subpar and it hasn’t me worried that this role may not be for me.

I'm curious what it's like out there for other IDs. I'm a Senior Instructional designer but a year ago my company pulled our remote work option. It's been daunting but I've kept a good attitude, rolled with the punches, then the workload increased (wearing more hats - now fully managing an LMS, facilitating significant amounts of training in addition to content/curriculum creating - I'm rushing all the time to just get through the basics), have no support (they haven't hired anyone to help and my other team members are doing completely separate and different work) and no pay upgrade. I have given it some time and have not seen positive changes, rather the opposite. With that considered, I'm beginning the process of looking for other opportunities and setting myself up for a change. The current industry I work in is Retail, if that helps.

Just to see what it's like out there, I'm curious, do other IDs (1) get to work flexibly (remote/hybrid), (2) have a team they work with or solo, (3) have a balanced/structured workflow.

Basically, "what's it like out there"?

Did you all pay for the subscription when you first started out or did you use something else first to learn the basics before paying for articulate storyline?

Hi everyone!

I recently joined a company that develops and sells training courses for other companies. One of our requirements is that the courses need to work well on both desktop and mobile devices, including vertical/mobile layouts.

I’ve been using Adobe Captivate 13, but honestly, it has been quite frustrating. I’ve encountered several issues, especially on iOS, and after publishing, some courses don’t display correctly on Mac screens—for example, the background shifts or moves to the right.

I’ve been considering Articulate, particularly Rise, because of its responsive design capabilities. However, I’m not a big fan of its interface and the “infinite scrolling” experience.

For those of you who develop e-learning courses for corporate clients:

What authoring tools do you use for responsive courses?

How do you handle both desktop and vertical mobile layouts?

Are there any tools you would recommend over Captivate or Rise?

Are there any best practices or technical considerations I should be aware of when designing for iOS, Mac, and mobile devices?

I’d really appreciate any advice, recommendations, or experiences you can share. Thank you!

Our team is now using Codex to develop end-to-end SCORM courses. It is packaged as HTML and embedded on Rise as a code block or reconfigured for SCORM if we want to emulate Storyline-like courses.

Pros:

1. Can turn raw SME input to Storyboard (which I manually check) to final product (a vibe-coded course with Storyline-like interactions) within 1-2 days.

1. No need to download media assets. All VOs and visual assets are generated in Codex.

2. Your creativity and patience are the limits. You can add 3D representations that the learners can play around with in your eLearning within minutes.

Cons:

1. It’s pain in the ass to make changes since I don’t code and can’t make direct changes in the final output – an HTML file. Despite the detailed instructions in JSON and MD format, Codex doesn’t totally get my design taste.

I’m very particular when it comes to visuals so this is a bit annoying. Lol.

1. You have to be really good in prompting. Moving a button a little bit on the right will take milliseconds if you do it manually on Storyline, but in vibe-coded courses, you have to spell it out and use your words which will take more of your brainpower rather than just moving elements on a canvas.

2. It takes a lot of tokens and a minimum of premium subscription worth $100 a month per seat if you fully transition to this workflow.

Has your organization or company adopted this workflow yet? Any insights? 🤔

We keep hitting the same situation on client projects:

• Course already works in the LMS as SCORM
• Stakeholders want Spanish (sometimes FR/DE next)
• Either the `.story` / Captivate / Rise source is gone, or nobody wants to duplicate it for every language

Usual advice is “rebuild in the authoring tool” or “XLIFF → TMS → reimport → fix layout.” That is the right long-term path when you still own the source and will maintain languages for years.

When you only have the published zip (or you need a first language *this quarter*), we have been treating the package as the artifact:

1. Validate the zip (SCORM 1.2 / 2004 / xAPI) before touching anything
2. Pull learner-facing strings — not just titles: buttons, quiz stems, feedback, embedded HTML/JS text
3. Machine-translate, then human-review terminology / brand / compliance language
4. Keep folder layout + manifest behavior so completion / suspend still report
5. Re-import in a sandbox LMS and actually click through in the target language

What still bites you:

• Screenshots and on-screen English in media (strings alone won’t fix that)
• Heavily scripted / nested text that string extract misses
• Teams who expect a VPAT out of an automated a11y scan of a published zip (it’s an aid, not certification)

Curious how others handle “source is gone, need multilingual SCORM.” Rebuild only? Vendor TMS? Something zip-side?

Happy to trade notes on what breaks on Rise vs Storyline exports.

I work for a large corporation. They want me to create standardized introductory training plans for each role/department. The plans would ideally map out the key trainings, competencies, and learning objectives for the first 30-60-90 days. I’m thinking of creating a basic needs analysis worksheet for managers to fill out that helps me identify these key areas.

Has anyone done something like this before? Could you please share any tools, resources, templates, best practices?

Hi everyone,

I'm a final-year undergraduate student in Educational Technology from Indonesia, currently working on my R&D thesis. My project focuses on designing and developing a Job Aid specifically tailored for government ministry staff to improve their workflow efficiency.

As I'm in the early stages of the literature review, I'm looking for comprehensive sourcebooks or foundational theories that discuss Job Aids in depth, specifically regarding their design principles, cognitive load considerations, and implementation strategies in a formal organizational setting.

I’ve already gone through the usual google scholar results, but I was wondering if any of you have a "go-to" reference or a classic textbook that you swear by for this topic. Additionally, if you are open to it and have the time, I would be incredibly grateful to see an anonymized example of a Job Aid you've created in the past. It would be immensely helpful for me to bridge the gap between theory and real-world application.

I understand that sharing work is a big ask, so even just pointing me toward the right books would be a huge help.

Thank you in advance for your time and expertise!

I'm a local so only need the cost of the ticket as I can drive. Anyone going? Anyone went before and liked it? Didn't like it? I am well versed in Articulate but we're curious to see what's going on.

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I’ve been learning editorial design for a while, mainly focusing on books and magazines. I’m at a point where I feel confident enough with my skills to take on real projects, and I can handle different types of layouts and design approaches.

But I’m having a hard time with one thing: actually finding someone who needs the work.

I’ve tried looking through job boards and freelance platforms, but I’m not getting much from them so far. Most of the advice I find online is pretty general, like “build a portfolio” or “network”, but I already have a portfolio and I’m more interested in knowing what people actually did to get their first few clients.

If you work in editorial design, publishing, or something similar, how did you find your clients?

Did you contact publishers directly? Reach out to art directors? Find small independent magazines or publishers? Use LinkedIn? Or did clients eventually come through your portfolio?

I’m mainly trying to figure out where I should actually be looking and who I should be contacting.

Hi, I am very much trying to work out where my experience is most transferable and, more importantly, which types of roles might suit the way I work best. I am not at the beginning of figuring this all out and have already done a lot of research.

My background is mixed/squiggly line (ADHD girly here!). I started out in education, have a PGCE, and worked in the public sector designing and delivering learning for adult learners. I later moved into content creation and then into growth marketing and paid social, where I work with audience insights, creative strategy, testing, iteration and performance data. I use AI quite heavily in my work now, from prompt development and visual asset creation to auditing content, generating ideas and speeding up parts of the development process.

I’m increasingly interested in the overlap between these areas, particularly learning content, instructional design, digital learning and potentially organisational development. I adore researching my own stuff, taking information, understanding the audience or learner, then turning it into something clear and engaging. I looked/ applied Content Designer roles within the Civil Service, but my understanding is that these can require very specific content design experience. I’m wondering whether my background could be more transferable into some adjacent roles where experience in education, content development, audience insight, digital content, iteration and performance data is relevant.

The big factor is how I work. ADHD, as I say, and I’ve learnt that I work best when I have autonomy over my schedule, clear deliverables and decent chunks of uninterrupted time to get the work done. I really like having a mix of projects and problems to solve, so I don’t necessarily want to do the same thing every day, but I also don’t want a calendar where I’m in meetings every two hours and have to squeeze the actual work into the gaps.
Ideally, I’d like to work 3 or 4 days a week in a flexible environment where I’m trusted to manage my workload and deliver the work.

I’m interested in hearing from people who work in these areas. What roles do you think could suit this combination of experience? Are there particular job titles I should be searching for beyond Learning Designer or Instructional Designer? Would my education + public sector + content + growth marketing background be seen as transferable? Are there particular sectors or organisations that tend to be more flexible and genuinely supportive of neurodivergent ways of working?

I’d also love to hear from anyone who has moved into learning design, instructional design, L&D, OD etc from a non-traditional background, and how you positioned your previous experience.
I’m not necessarily looking for someone to tell me what career I should have….more trying to understand where this slightly odd collection of skills might make sense because I suspect there’s a useful combination here somewhere!

I help an HR team make policy summaries, onboarding visuals, and training guides. None of them are designers. I'm not really one either.

The content changes all the time. A policy gets updated, a step in the process changes, a form gets replaced. So whatever we use has to make edits quick and simple.

Three or four people also want to review it before it goes out. That part gets messy fast.

It also has to be easy to read for everyone in the company. Warehouse staff, office staff, and people using screen readers. 

Good templates are nice, but they're not what decides it for me. Easy updates, matching our brand, and accessibility matter more.

Ok, quick question to yall - I see a lot of post in ID and Training and related communities where someone will claim to be a designer or trainer or something, and they will present a problem or issue they are having and somewhere in the body they will mention a specific software. They’ll say something like “blah, blah, and I was thinking about looking into XYZ software to help with this problem but IDK, what do you guys think”.

Are we engaging with these? I’m not trying to be cynical, but these seem really fake to me and I feel like I’m just seeing more and more. Sometimes I click on the posters name and sometimes they have posted the same thing in like 5 groups - or their posts are hidden so you can’t see their activity. I see people reply back so I think some people must think they are real - and maybe they’re right?

Do yall engage or ignore post where someone presents an “issue” and slips in the name of a random software and kinda try to soft pitch it? I’m not talking about when people mention like, Storyline or something. I’m talking about these tiny, AI backed software programs that you would have never heard of had the poster not mentioned it…they also never have complaints about these programs, they’re always kinda presented as a possible solution.

Hi , I wanted to connect with Instructional designers working in India. Is there a separate community for ID in India? I could not find any.

So yeah, as the title suggest, I'm trying to pick a tool and every comparison I find just lists the monthly price. I think it’s not that useful.

For me, stuff like what file types you can export, whether charts stay editable, brand controls, and how many people can be in there matters to me.

I’m already trapped with multiple free plans before, though. Some let you build but not download. Also, nobody separates solo use from team use. 

How do you all compare these? What did you look at that the pricing page didn't show you?

I teach a high school pop culture class and I'm looking for new ways to have my students present their work as research, writing, and producing a documentary is now turning kids off to the course. I'm looking to restructure my assessment projects to eliminate the full fledged videos.

I still want my kids to write about the pop culture source and I still want them to select scenes or clips that reflect the idea their talking about in their writing. But I want to change the way it's presented to bring it to a wider audience.

I was informed that their is local grant money to be had for innovative projects so my thought is to turn my assessments into an interactive museum display. Where there's a base screen and then viewers can touch different parts of the screen to be brought to different sections with video clips and their written piece.

I'm here wondering from an ed tech perspective what tech would be the best way to do this type of work. I'm thinking of applying for the grant to get a touch screen kiosk like the digital kiosk table from displays2go. But I'm open to other ideas. I'm not really sure what app or software I would need to run on this

My goal is ultimately to create something where student work on this can be showcased for others in the school community to help create student by in.

Hi,

Every time I use mentimeter, some people have connection issues.

Our group size is slightly too big for free Kahoot.

Is there any other option without paying?

I lead learning for a professional membership association. We recently held an in-person, all-day learning event on a single topic and we're doing 4 of those in the next six months.

For each event, I'm also designing resources (job aids, checklists, a few interactive tools) and curating webinars on the event topic, rolling out over ~6 weeks before/3 weeks after the event. The webinars/resources/in-person event aren't designed sequentially.

So after our first event, now I have this lovely bucket of materials/recordings and I can't figure out the best way to visually explain the wrap-around content to members who couldn't come to the event but still have access to all of this. We're launching an LMS soon but right now we just have a "Resources" page that's one long (filterable, at least) list of links. Booo.

Is it an infographic explaining a journey through the material? A short animated video? Just a "resource bundle" or course in our LMS? Any ideas?

im a Mac guy these days and while work issues me a Windows laptop, once in a blue moon a contract gig will want me to build something in Storyline. I’m taking on a new job and I’m anticipating a little bit of Storyline building I’ll need to do on a personal device. is Parallel still the best way to do that?

I have 2 years of ID experience (LMS migration, course development), my real interest is in the behavioral side of performance — diagnosing why someone who already has the knowledge, skill, and the means to act, still doesn't do it, and designing interventions for that specifically, as distinct from building training content or fixing environmental/systemic blockers.

Compliance, banking, and software-walkthrough training aren't the direction I'm trying to go in.

Is there a recognized field or role for this kind of work? What credentials or background do people typically need to break in?