From Rise to Unrestricted: What Becomes Possible When Learning Scales

Customer Perspective on Rise-to-dominKnow Conversion

Jack, I know you were coming into this perhaps like many, a little skeptical. Tell us a little bit about your experience and what you were thinking going in, and how those thoughts changed, or didn’t change, by the end.

I was absolutely amazed at the conversion that your team did. I know this course was one of the early conversions.

Since then, we’ve done many more conversions for the same client, converting all of their Rise courses into dominKnow.

Every single one has been absolutely amazing.

When we look at what we imported versus what we ended up with in dominKnow, the difference is night and day.

The content wasn’t just preserved — it was enhanced. The courses became more flexible, more interactive, and far easier to work with moving forward.

What started as a cautious experiment quickly became a repeatable, scalable approach that we’ve now applied across many courses for the same organization.

Launch Page Theme Choice

Come into the launch page?

Yes, it is. But it's using a different theme.

Jack, you wanna talk a little bit about this and why? Yeah.

This particular choice.

'cause there are several choices, not just this

one and the other one in there.

Keeping a Rise-Like Look vs Changing the Focus

Yeah, I mean, if we wanted to have the same rise type look

and feel, which for one client, we actually do want

to have that same look and seal.

And so we've kept everything kind of looking rise like,

but in this case, we wanted the learner to have a little bit

of a different focus on the fact

that there are three things they need

to complete rather than a big menu.

Clarity on What to Do Next and Time to Complete

And to have them click in

and see, okay, it's gonna take me four minutes

for this piece, 40 minutes for this,

six minutes for the last section.

So we wanted to really separate the information for them,

have it a little bit more visually appealing, have it easier

for them to access and responsive.

Designing for Multiple Audiences

I found that fresh out of school instructional designers are thinking about this, but those who have been out for a while, they’ve kind of stopped thinking about this because it just really wasn’t possible.

And I’m talking about those courses where you have two different audiences. Maybe it’s management and employees.

Shared and Unique Learner Needs

They’re all doing airline maintenance and they have a lot of very same needs. But within that, there’s unique needs as well.

So sometimes people break the course up into smaller pieces to distribute it that way.

Challenges with Duplicated Content

Or they create two completely separate courses, which then leads to duplicated content and maintenance challenges.

And when things change, now you’re updating multiple courses instead of one.

A More Flexible Course Strategy

But if you can build one course that serves multiple audiences, where shared content stays shared and unique content is conditional, that’s where things get really powerful.

It opens up possibilities that just weren’t realistic before.

Why This Was Difficult with Traditional Tools

This approach was really challenging for us. With Rise, we had to create…

Layouts Beyond Blocks

This talks into the next one, layouts beyond the block.

Block repeat and that not just the navigation. Yeah.

But it gives some of the look and feel in there.

And let's take a a look at that just, yeah.

Looking through this course here,

we see here there's a parex effects going in the background.

Laid out this of something a little bit simpler here,

but I know in Rise, one of the things you're like, eh,

it works, but didn't work the way I wanted to.

Right. In terms of the transcript open, having it left

and right, instead of just stacking, you really have a lot

of different choices in here.

Responsive Layout and Connected Content

Coming on with this page here, laying out

with the different items, again, how they're connected,

how they respond in the responsive environment.

Having some of this in, changing that up a little bit

and then having an interactive video.

Brand Realization and Reusable Assets

But tell me a little bit more about the page changes. Yeah.

And the types of things that you could do to

really realize that brand.

The experience, the instructional design.

So remember when this was done,

there have been some updates to both products, both Domino

and Rise since my team took on these conversion projects.

So you have to keep in mind that there are some updates.

Maybe the software does what I wanted it to do at the time,

but we really wanted to have one section that we could work

with of reusable objects or content.

So images, icons, text titles.

There are a number of different things we

wanted to be able to use.

Rise Limitations and Client Expectations

And when you went into Rise, there were the same.

You could have text with an image,

you could have text over top of an image,

you could have a carousel.

To us, it was a little bit limiting,

especially since we're storyline experts, so we already know

how to develop in storyline,

but the client wanted rise,

so we really had some challenges making Rise look the way we

wanted it to look, or would look the way the client thought

it should look because they don't know Rise.

Interactivity Limits in Template-Based Authoring

One of the issues that comes up again and again is that interactivity can feel restrictive. You may have built-in components, and while those can be useful, the options are often limited in terms of layouts, designs, branching, and other interaction types that simply aren’t possible.

At the time we created the sample we’re reviewing, there were significant limitations on what we could do creatively for learner interaction. We wanted to go beyond what Rise allowed, which led us to rely heavily on integrated Storyline blocks because our choices were so constrained.

If we wanted to do anything outside of what Rise offered, we had to look beyond the tool itself. You can’t simply add a plugin or extend Rise to support more advanced interactions.

And that’s really the point — you shouldn’t have to. With dominKnow, I don’t have to work around those limitations to create the interactions I need.

Designing Reflective Learning for Empathy and Context

This was a type of reflective exercise designed to get people to pause and really think about what they are doing as they enter the course.

Learners are prompted early to take a moment to reflect and type in their thoughts. This content was designed for both employees and residents in a substance use recovery environment.

It’s important to remind staff who have worked in recovery residences for a long time what the experience can be like for someone new to the program. Over time, familiarity can make it easy to forget why certain procedures feel stressful or overwhelming to new residents.

Learners are asked to reflect on the challenges someone may face when entering a recovery residence. This context helps them better understand why processes like urinalysis can be stressful and emotionally charged.

For some residents, participation in urinalysis may be tied to serious consequences, including legal outcomes or the risk of losing their housing within the recovery residence. These realities make the process deeply meaningful and high-stakes.

This reflection is critical to understanding the success of someone entering a recovery environment. From an instructional design perspective, learners are asked to reflect at the beginning of the course and then return to their original thoughts after reviewing the content.

The system allows learners to recall and revisit what they initially wrote, supporting deeper reflection and learning continuity. This type of reflective experience was not possible in Rise at the time.

The approach relies on a full variable system, including system variables, project variables, and reusable global variables, allowing learner input to be stored and reused throughout the course.

Scenarios and Branching

Let's talk a very briefly about scenarios.

So this is a built in, of course you can do your own custom branching, but this was a one-on-one discussion.

When you first were using rise, there were some limitations.

They actually wanted a custom character. Couldn't do that.

So you're choosing a, I didn't want a character. Ultimately.

You didn't do a scenario on that. No, we didn't.

But when you went over to Domino, you had that capability to do a scenario.

Scoring, Feedback, and Visualizing the Scenario

Mm-hmm. And we'll open that real quick here.

We wanted to be able to treat this like almost like a knowledge assessment, right?

Where we could give them a score at the end and say, Hey, you did it. Good job.

Where, oh, I think you need to try this again.

So we could give them a score. We couldn't do that in Rise.

So there are a couple of things that I absolutely love about the Domino scenario.

Features that help me work, and this is one of them.

I can see my build and I can look at all of the feedback that I'm gonna give my learner.

And you know, the connections between, if they answer this correct, they're gonna get a hundred percent score if they get all the way through.

And because scenarios can be quite complicated, having that visual is really nice.

They wanted a custom character, which we haven't finalized yet, which is why we've just chosen a blank character for this.

Once we give the custom character that they've determined they want, we'll add that in.

Using xAPI Data to Improve Content

And I know as your team was looking at XAPI, one of the other appealing things was, hey, this score, as well as what choices they were picking are that's automatically sent as part of that XAPI data for the learners there.

Because as an instructional designer, it's important for me to know what are they selecting because it's based on the content that they just covered, covering the 12 steps above or the eight steps above.

So if they're not making the right selections to get through, or how many times they're taking it, if they're trying again, exactly, then I need to know, do I need to go back to my original content and make changes to that so it's more easy to understand.