5 Mental Health Resources You Can Share With Your Learners Today
Did you know that May is Mental Health Awareness Month? Individuals aren’t the only ones impacted by mental health challenges—businesses can feel the effects, too. Polling from Gallup indicates that employees with mental health challenges miss four times more work than those who rate their mental health positively. This lost productivity costs the economy some $47.6 billion annually. As an e-learning designer, you can help employees feel supported by providing resources that raise awareness of the importance of mental health and outline helpful tips for improving it. If you’re an Articulate 360 subscriber or trialer, you can get the ball rolling quickly by using the ready-to-use mental health training materials in Rise 360—just in time for Mental Health Awareness Month. Curious what’s available? Check out some of the new releases below. You can learn how to customize these templates for your own company and training needs at the end of this article. 1. Stress Busters Microlearning Course Encourage employees to feel more relaxed with the 9 Simple Stress Busters You Can Do Today microlearning course. Moving through this quick learning exercise reveals proven strategies for relieving stress and activating feel-good endorphins. 2. Breathing Exercises Microlearning Course Anyone feeling tense can benefit from the Melt Away Stress With a 3-Minute Breathing Exercise microlearning course. With each successive swipe through a guided breathing exercise and accompanying graphics, learners will feel more peaceful and serene. 3. Feel Your Feelings Microlearning Course Reinforce the message that it’s OK not to be OK with the Feel Your Feelings microlearning course. This quick activity helps people process difficult emotions by prompting them to name and explore their feelings from a place of compassion and understanding. 4. Get Grounded Microlearning Course Support employees through worry spirals and mental fog with the Escape Anxiety With a 5-Minute Grounding Practice microlearning course. Moving through this 5-minute practice roots learners in the here and now as they engage their senses of taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. 5. Day-by-Day Challenge Course To offer access to a more in-depth daily challenge, check out the 5-Day Challenge To Improve Mental Health course. Each day, learners can refer to this course, explore a different facet of mental health, and follow simple exercises for putting concepts into practice. Wrap-Up Providing mental health resources as part of your business training is a win-win. Employees have access to support at work, and businesses benefit from employees who are less stressed and anxious. The examples above can help you get started, but the sky’s the limit for how you can use Articulate’s creator tools to achieve your business training objectives. Interested in sharing one of the supportive resources with your team? If you’re an Articulate 360 subscriber or trialer, you can access and edit all the examples linked throughout this post directly fromyour Rise 360 dashboard. Simply click Create New, choose Microlearning and select the template you want to use, as shown in the video below: Looking for even more ready-to-use, customizable mental health content? You'll find those in your Rise 360 dashboard too. Just click Create New, choose Course, and then select Mix & Match Lessons. Here are some relevant topic categories to check out: Stress Management: covers stress management fundamentals, stress and work performance, and strategies to relieve stress. Health and Wellness: includes dealing with difficult emotions and life events, exercise, forming healthy habits, mental health awareness in the workplace, positive psychology fundamentals, and positive psychology in the workplace. Resilience: features content on resilience fundamentals, building career resilience, leadership and resilience, emotional and physical resilience, and thriving through challenges. Be sure to also follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and come back to E-Learning Heroes for more advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.Upcoming Articulate 360 Training Webinars
Stay ahead of the curve with our free Articulate 360 Training webinars. These weekly sessions are designed to help busy course creators like you enhance your e-learning skills without investing too much time. As an Articulate 360 subscriber, you can grow your expertise through targeted training on the latest techniques and best practices – all at no additional cost. And if you want to view some on-demand training to view at your own time, visit the Articulate 360 training site to see what's available. Check out our upcoming webinars and level up your e-learning game. If you can't attend, that's OK. We record all of the sessions, so just sign up and you'll get a recording emailed to you. Date Title October 8, 2024 ✨ Overview of AI Assistant in Rise October 8, 2024 ✨ Overview of AI Assistant in Storyline October 8, 2024 Getting Started With Storyline 360 October 8, 2024 How to Build Compliance Training in Rise 360 October 10, 2024 ✨ Overview of AI Assistant in Storyline October 10, 2024 ✨ Overview of AI Assistant in Rise October 15, 2024 Getting Started With Rise 360 October 15, 2024 ✨ Overview of AI Assistant in Storyline October 15, 2024 ✨ Overview of AI Assistant in Rise October 15, 2024 Getting Started with Reach 360 October 22, 2024 Branding your Rise 360 Course October 22, 2024 Getting Started With Storyline 360 October 22, 2024 ✨ Overview of AI Assistant in Rise October 22, 2024 ✨ Overview of AI Assistant in Storyline October 24, 2024 Unleash Your Inner Spark: Supercharge Your Self-Care with E-Learning with Guest Presenter Misty Wert October 29, 2024 ✨ Overview of AI Assistant in Rise October 29, 2024 ✨ Overview of AI Assistant in Storyline October 29, 2024 Reach 360: Ask Us Anything #2 October 29, 2024 Getting Started With Rise 360 October 31, 2024 Quick Tips and Tricks: Episode 109 Not yet an Articulate 360 subscriber? Sign up for a 30-day free trial and check out as many as you’d like. And if the live webinar time doesn’t work for you, no worries! Simply sign up anyway and you’ll receive the recording in your inbox so you can watch it whenever you have time. Hope to see you at one of our upcoming webinars!Unlock New Skills with AI Assistant Training
We’re thrilled that AI Assistant is here, and the Articulate 360 training page is packed to the brim with videos and resources designed to get you up and running fast. Whether you're looking to sharpen your skills with AI image generation or refine your writing using the power of AI, our on-demand video library is here to support you on your journey. Live Webinars Save your spot in our live sessions! You’ll learn how to partner with AI Assistant to improve writing, generate content and images, instantly convert blocks, create text-to-speech narration, and more. AI Assistant in Storyline Upcoming Webinars AI Assistant in Rise Upcoming Webinars On-Demand Training One of the best parts about our training videos is the flexibility they offer. You can watch them anytime, anywhere—whether you have a few minutes or a full hour to spare. You’ll be able to apply what you’ve learned in no time, boosting your confidence and competence using AI Assistant. AI Assistant in Storyline On-Demand Training AI Assistant in Rise On-Demand Training Hands-On Practice We know that hands-on experience is crucial. That’s why our practice videos are designed to provide real-world examples and practical exercises using AI Assistant. Pause, rewind, or rewatch sections as you practice alongside the video. Hands-on Practice with AI Assistant and Storyline Hands-on Practice with AI Assistant and Rise Feature Tutorials Our easy-to-follow video tutorials walk you through all the key functionalities of AI Assistant, ensuring you get the most out of every feature. Whether you’re looking to master a specific function or explore new capabilities, our short tutorial videos are designed to make learning quick and enjoyable. AI Assistant in Rise Tutorials AI Assistant in Storyline Tutorials Resources to Bookmark For more help getting started with these features, check out our handy user guides: Accelerate Course Creation with Articulate AI Rise 360: Create Content with AI Assistant Storyline 360: Create Content with AI Assistant And if you want more information about AI Assistant and the other AI features we’re working on, head over to these resources: Articulate 360 FAQs: Articulate AI Build Compelling Courses Up to 9x Faster with Articulate’s AI Assistant How E-Learning Experts Are Shaping Articulate AI How Articulate AI Safeguards Your Data Articulate 360 Feature RoadmapTime-Saving Tips for Formatting Tables in Rise 360
Do you love the table block in Rise 360 as much as I do? It’s a great way to organize content so it’s easy for learners to digest. And there are so many different ways to use it! Whether you want to display product specs, outline your weekly schedule, or compare and contrast concepts, tables are an excellent option. Depending on how you’re using tables, you might want to customize their look and feel by adding a background color to certain cells, for example, or by changing the font size. Luckily, personalizing table formatting is super quick and easy in Rise 360! Read on to find out how to efficiently format multiple cells at once. Formatting Multiple Cells If you want to change the way your cells look—say, change the background color from white to green or gray—there’s an easy way to apply that formatting to multiple cells at once. Simply click inside a cell, press and hold Shift, use the arrows on your keyboard to select the other cells you want to apply the formatting to, and select the format you want to apply in the toolbar. It’s super easy! Check out the GIF below to see how it works. Formatting Text Across Cells Once you’re happy with the formatting of the cells themselves, you might want to change the formatting of the text within those cells. For example, let’s say you want all your text to be a little smaller. No problem! There are a couple of different ways to quickly format your text across cells, depending on what you want to do. To apply the same text formatting to all the cells in your table, simply highlight the text in one cell, press and hold Control+A (or Command+A on a Mac), and select the format you want to apply in the toolbar. Take a look at the GIF below for a quick preview of how this works. If you want to reformat the text across some cells, but not all, highlight the text in one cell, press and hold Shift, and use the down arrow to select the cells with text you want to format. Every time you press on the down arrow, it’ll automatically select the entire text in the next cell. Once you’ve selected all the cells with text you want to format, choose the formatting options you want to apply in the toolbar. Get a clearer picture of how this works by checking out the GIF below. You can also select text that you want to format letter by letter. To do this, highlight the text in one cell, press and hold the Shift key, use the right arrow to select the cells with the text you want to format, and select the format you want to apply in the toolbar. See how this works in the GIF below. More Resources As you can see, formatting tables in Rise 360 is super fast and easy. To find out more about inserting table blocks into your Rise 360 courses, check out this helpful article. And if you’re looking for some creative ideas on how to use the table block in your next course, be sure to check out the following resources: Displaying Your Data with Rise 360 Tables Rise 360 Example Featuring Table Blocks If you’re dying to try out Rise 360 but don’t have Articulate 360, be sure to grab a free 30-day trial. And subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest e-learning inspiration and insights directly in your inbox. You can also find us on LinkedIn and X (Formerly Twitter).10 Most Popular Rise 360 Real-Content Templates of 2023
Developing high-quality, engaging content can be time-consuming. But don’t worry—with the real-content templates in Content Library 360, you can quickly deploy fully developed training full of prewritten content, instructional videos, and interactive exercises. Editing real-content template is easy too, making it a breeze to personalize your courses to fit your needs. From time management to mental health to effective meetings and more, here are the templates our customers found most valuable in 2023. 1. Time Management Essentials For the second year in a row, Time Management Essentials is the number one most popular real-content course. This crowd-pleasing course gives learners valuable tips for making the most of their time. 2. Developing a Growth Mindset Is your team feeling stuck? Want to help employees unlock their potential? Try sharing this course to help learners identify roadblocks and reignite growth. 3. Leading with Emotional Intelligence Explore empathy, social skills, and other essential soft skills for leadership in this course. 4. The Basics of Managing Stress Give your learners valuable information about the connection between the body and stress and actionable tips for how to manage it. 5. 5-Day Challenge to Improve Your Mental Health Challenge your learners to improve their mental health in just five days with interactive exercises, reflection questions, and more. 6. Workplace Communication Basics Help your team communicate more effectively with the verbal and written strategies in this course. 7. Resolving Conflict with Coworkers Conflict is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to slow your team down. Use this course to teach your team how to work through common issues. 8. Communication Fundamentals Help your team understand why communication matters and learn actionable tips and tricks to improve their skills. 9. A Guide to Effective Meetings Use this course to establish a culture of productive, energetic meetings within your team. 10. Soliciting and Responding to Customer Feedback Help your employees gather and respond expertly to customer feedback with this story-driven course. Wrap-Up Ready to try one of these real-content templates? Or curious to see what other templates are available? Log in to your Rise 360 dashboard, click +Create New, and click Course. This will open a dashboard where you can browse all templates currently available for subscribers. Have an idea for a real-content template? Let us know in the comments! Want to try one of these real-content templates, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial. And subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest product updates, e-learning examples, and expert advice sent directly to your inbox. If you have questions, please share them in the comments.Create Compliance Training Like a Pro with Rise 360
Many businesses, including financial institutions and publicly regulated companies, are required by law to make sure their employees are properly educated in specific areas pertaining to their industry. This kind of training is often referred to as compliance training. If you’re an e-learning developer, you’ve likely had to create these types of courses. They typically cover topics such as workplace discrimination, ethics training, bribery prevention, and data security—crucial information that employees need to know to do their jobs correctly and avoid breaking laws. I love to use Rise 360, the web-based authoring tool available in Articulate 360, to create compliance training. Why? Because Rise 360 courses are easy to create and update, and they can be built collaboratively. Rise 360 also allows you to require learners to view all the content, which is important with compliance training since you need to be able to demonstrate to regulators that learners have been exposed to all the required information. And, of course, the responsive output from Rise 360 looks beautiful across all devices employees use to access courses. Here’s a sample compliance course built in Rise 360 that covers how to avoid common workplace injuries. Click on the image, or the link below it, to check it out. View Compliance Training Example Now that you’ve seen an example course, let’s walk through some key considerations for compliance training andsome Rise 360 features you can use to address them. Use the Continue Block As I mentioned earlier, one important consideration for e-learning developers creating compliance training is making sure learners can’t skip any content. This can be accomplished easily using the continue block. The continue block can be set up to prevent a learner from moving on until they’ve seen all of the previous content. Quickly insert a continue block by clicking Continue on the blocks shortcut bar. You can also find the continue block in the block library by selecting the Divider option. A continue block can work in different ways, depending on which completion type you choose under the completion type drop-down menu. These options include: None (Always Show Button): The Continue button is always visible. Learners can click on it anytime to move to the next block. Complete All Blocks Above: The Continue button is disabled until learners complete all blocks above the continue block. Complete Block Directly Above: The Continue button is disabled until learners complete the block directly above the continue block. The safety course example above uses a continue block at the end of each lesson with the “Complete All Blocks Above” setting. But what if you added custom interactivity created with Storyline 360 to your Rise 360 lesson? Is there a way to make sure learners complete a Storyline 360 block? No problem. Simply follow these steps to configure your custom interaction in Storyline 360. Then, in Rise 360, add a Storyline 360 block followed by a continue block to your lesson. You can also use a Storyline 360 block to track the completion of a Rise 360 course in your LMS. You can choose to track completion based on a trigger, quiz result, or the number of slides viewed in your Storyline 360 block. Enable Restricted Navigation When you’re creating a compliance course with Rise 360, you might consider using restricted navigation in conjunction with your continue block. Restricting navigation means your learner must click through each lesson in lesson order. For example, the learner would have to take lessons sequentially and wouldn’t be able to click ahead to the final lesson without viewing each lesson before it. You can find the settings for controlling course navigation under the settings menu. Under the navigation mode drop-down, choose Restricted. On top of restricting your course navigation, you might want to restrict navigation on any videos you’ve included so that learners can’t skip ahead through video content with the seekbar. To restrict navigation in a video, simply go to the settings tab for the video in question and disable Allow Forward Seeking. Now your learners will no longer be able to use the seekbar to skip over important video content! Require a Passing Score on the Quiz Quizzing is another important aspect of your compliance courses. You want to make sure learners fully understand all the quiz questions and their correct answers. There are a few tips you can follow to make sure that your quizzes are as compliant as possible. First of all, you can control course navigation by requiring learners to pass a quiz before moving on to the next lesson. Just open up your quiz, click the Settings option, and switch “Require Passing Score to Continue” to the on position. When this setting is enabled, learners must achieve the passing score you define to advance to the next lesson in the course. Another way to make sure your compliance courses are as effective as possible is to require that learners score 100 percent on the final quiz, and give them unlimited attempts. This will force learners to repeat the quiz until they answer the questions correctly, which is about as certain as you can be that learners have understood the correct information. To change the passing score, open up the quiz, click Settings in the top right corner, and adjust the passing score. Here’sone last animted.GIF to show you where to find this setting. And there you have it! Creating compliance training is a snap with Rise 360. Have any tips of your own for creating compliance courses with Rise 360? Please add them in the comments below! Want to try something you learned here, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.8 Business Use Cases for Microlearning
Are you excited to try out microlearning, but unsure when to use it? Below, we outline eight common workplace situations that benefit from a short-form course. Each situation includes a sample microlearning. At the end, learn how you can customize these templates for your own company and training needs. 1. Create Organizational Alignment To hit a business target, everyone needs to be moving in the same direction. Creating that alignment starts with clear, frequent communication of the shared mission, vision, and values. Microlearning can help. The following editable template shows how you can align employees through regular executive “micro” updates: Executive Update 2. Highlight HR Information, Notices, or Reminders Educating employees about annual events like open enrollment, tax season, and compliance training is a critical function of HR teams. The problem? Important announcements often get missed when they’re embedded in long paragraphs or endless emails. Grab the following templates to see how microlearning makes HR communications more digestible and engaging: A Quick Guide To Open Enrollment Internal Company Newsletter 3. Strengthen Company Culture and DEI Initiatives Fostering an inclusive company culture is a continuous process—not a one-time effort. A series of microlearnings can support your larger culture-building and DEI efforts. Check out the following examples for ideas on how to get started: Are You an Ally? Try Taking on These 5 Roles How To Identify and Stop Using Ableist Language Gossip-Proof Your Workplace 4. Streamline Business Processes You can also use microlearning to document and streamline business processes or workflows—such as employee onboarding or performance management. Notice how the following examples make it easy for employees to work through the steps of a process independently: New Hire Pre-Hire Checklist Performance Review and Feedback 5. Increase Security Awareness Most successful data breaches, phishing attacks, and other cybersecurity incidents are caused by human error. Adding refresher microlearnings throughout the year can fortify your defenses. See an example for safeguarding against phishing attacks below: Spot the Phish 6. Enhance Employee Wellness A successful business needs thriving employees. But employee wellness training often ends up buried under competing priorities. Microlearning makes it easy for employees to fit in short breaks for self-care throughout the workday. Check out these two wellness-related microlearning examples: 3 Desk Stretches to Instantly Improve Your Day 5 Tips for Better Naps 7. Provide Quick-Reference Guides Microlearning is the perfect resource for one-off training questions: Employees can quickly find the answers they need—when they need them. Below, we’ve created templates for product and software training. But you could easily create quick-reference guides for sales, customer service, and other teams. Get To Know [Name of Product] Software Training 8. Reinforce and Assess Key Takeaways Finally, who says you have to choose between a more sizable course and microlearning? Repetition aids retention. Consider following up longer training sessions with a microlearning quiz, scenario, or summary. The examples listed below demonstrate how you might do this: Can You Recover From a Workplace Mistake? Training Refresher Wrap-Up There’s no shortage of creative ways you can use microlearning to achieve your business training objectives. The examples above are just a starter list. You might also check out submissions to one of our weekly community challenges, 40+ Microlearning Examples Created in Rise 360 #407. Interested in customizing one of these examples for your team? If you’re an Articulate 360 subscriber or trialer, you can edit all of the examples linked throughout this post by choosing the course from our Rise 360 microlearning content templates. Here’s a short video showing how to do that: What’s the latest microlearning course you’ve created? Tell us about it in the comments—and feel free to ask any questions you might have! Like this article? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest e-learning inspiration and insights directly in your inbox. You can also find us on LinkedIn and Twitter.Get More Insight Into How Articulate 360 Apps Meet Accessibility Standards
When you want to ensure your e-learning works well for every learner, accessibility standards give you benchmarks to aim for. That said, it’s not always easy to know how these general guidelines map to actual app features and settings. That’s where the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) comes in. Companies use this document to share how their apps meet specific accessibility standards. And the practical insights in VPATs can help you explore the capabilities of the apps you use now and those you’re considering using in the future. VPATs have been available for Storyline 360, Rise 360, and Reach 360 for some time. Our recent updates, though, have made these documents even more useful for you! Here’s a peek at what’s new: EU guidelines: We originally developed our VPATs with US accessibility standards in mind. But to meet the needs of more customers outside the US, we’ve expanded these reports so they also align with EN 301 549 guidelines—the European standard for digital accessibility. WCAG AAA criteria: This is the highest level of accessibility conformance in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). In a previous update, we added the AAA criteria to the Storyline 360 VPAT. And we’re now delighted to include this information in the Rise 360 and Reach 360 VPATs too. WCAG 2.2 criteria: A recent update to the WCAG standards added exciting new success criteria. As a result, we've updated our Rise 360, Storyline 360, and Reach 360 VPATs with this information as well. That way, it's easier for you to understand how to use our apps to address these accessibility expanded recommendations. VPAT accessibility: We’ve also enhanced the accessibility of the VPATs themselves by shifting to more readable font sizes and colors. Whether you’re aiming to meet US or EU accessibility guidelines or are just looking for more insights into how our apps can help you craft truly accessible e-learning, these updates have a wealth of information to offer. Want to create accessible e-learning but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial. And subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest product updates, e-learning examples, and expert advice sent directly to your inbox. If you have questions, please share them in the comments.
