Rise, from Articulate Global, is a web-based system for course creation and learning, featuring a library of imagery and a collection of modular, customizable lessons on business topics relevant to every employee that can be mixed with the user's own content to develop custom courses faster.
$399
per month
Seismic Learning
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Seismic Learning (formerly Lessonly, acquired by Seismic in August 2021), is a learning management system (LMS). The vendor emphasizes eLearning for client-facing skills, as well as a drag-and-drop interface. Lessonly supports customizable learning paths and corporate onboarding processes.
We have utilized Articulate Rise for our primary curriculum design platform for multiple years. Although it can look pricey compared with other free options, they do a great job of supporting nonprofit use and more cost-effective. By doing so, they continue to be the best in the industry when it comes to value relative to cost with a nice suite of content creation tools that can easily create an out-of-the-box online curriculum while still being easy to navigate for traditional teachers who may be extremely knowledgeable about curriculum development but not tech-savvy. The product could benefit from more content formats and activity types (doesn't seem to have been updated in years) and more authority and control over color/visual palettes and style.
If you are onboarding new employees or consultants and you have a complex product, solution, or your business is layered and complex, this can help distill down the layers into basics so that new team or partners can build their knowledge base up the right way. This ensures they are learning what needs to be learned, and not what they surmise or assume, which can be incorrect and cause issues down the road - this is especially sensitive in our field. Training of all kinds can be done easily with this tool.
It's completely simple and intuitive, anyone can pick it up. The hardest part is looking for a save button and finally figuring out you don't need one. We don't provide training for users and never have complaints. For creators, we provide best practices, but using Lessonly itself requires nothing .
The support team is very friendly and eager to help you learn the ins and outs of Lessonly. They can set up training for large groups or send links in a chat for individual help. They are quick to respond and if one person doesn't have the answer, they will collaborate with others to help find the answer.
We chose Articulate Rise because it was the best balance of offering multiple design tools and embeddable content without being obnoxiously priced. Because the course design also ensures SCORM-compliance, whatever we create can easily be embedded in learning management systems later on. We looked at some more robust platforms but the type of tools they offered required a level of coding and technical expertise that would have left those same tools unused by staff. Meanwhile, many free services have some features but make it hard to create a truly cohesive, unified course experience (as opposed to disjointed activities and readings that essentially just get "collated" online). In this case, you really can build a great, linear, holistic course without spending an arm and a leg.
I felt some of these products had more features than were necessary and needed for our team. Some of them were limited on the number of content creators that were allowed which to me forces you to use one or two people to create content where I would rather see it done by key members of each department.
We've had an increase in quality overall as a company, as we are able to continually train our employees outside of our New Hire Training program.
We've seen stronger communication as we are able to send out material to our stylists about products, policies, procedures, etc. and they are able to provide us with feedback. After all, it is their tool for learning and we want to know the best way to provide that information to our Team Members.
