🎓 Lesson 5: Your First Rise Course: Lessons, Blocks, Themes & Responsive Preview

⏱️ Start Your Trial Now

Part 1 was all concepts and planning — no software needed. Part 2 is where you build, so this is the moment to start your free 30-day trial if you haven't already. We deliberately timed it this way: the whole hands-on stretch of the course — Rise (Part 2) and Storyline (Part 3) — fits comfortably inside one trial window if you work through it at a steady pace.

Good news for a lot of you: Rise 360 is browser-based and cross-platform. There's nothing to install and no Windows requirement — it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chromebooks. Sign in at articulate.com, open Rise, and you're authoring. (Storyline, which we reach in Part 3, is a Windows desktop app Windows only — but that's a Part 3 problem.)

How Rise Thinks: Course → Lessons → Blocks

Before you click anything, hold this one picture in your head. Everything in Rise nests in three tidy levels, like a book: the course is the whole book, each lesson is a chapter, and each lesson is built from a stack of blocks — the paragraphs, images, and interactions.

Figure 1 — Rise's content hierarchy: a course holds lessons (optionally grouped into sections); each lesson is a vertical stack of blocks.

A few clarifications that save beginners a lot of confusion:

• Lessons are the navigable pages of your course. Learners move through them one at a time (or jump around, depending on your navigation settings).
• Sections are optional headers that group related lessons in the course menu — handy for a longer course, ignorable for a short one.
• Blocks are the building units inside a lesson. You stack them top to bottom, and Rise handles the responsive layout for you.
• A Quiz lesson is a special lesson type for graded questions (we build one in Lesson 9). A regular content lesson can also hold ungraded Knowledge Check blocks (Lesson 8).

Why does this matter? Because once you see the course-lessons-blocks shape, every menu in Rise stops being mysterious. You're always working at one of those three levels, and the interface just follows you around.

Creating a Course & the Lesson Editor

From the Rise dashboard you'll see a button to create new content — in most versions it's labeled Create New, and it offers a few flavors: a full Course, a Microlearning piece (a short, single-topic format we cover in Lesson 9), and other templates. Choose Course, and Rise asks whether to start from a blank course or a ready-made template. Blank is perfect for learning.

Once inside, you add lessons from the course's outline, then open a lesson to reveal the lesson editor — the block stack. Hover between blocks (or at the top/bottom) and an insert control appears; click it to open the Block Library and drop a new block into place. Each block has a small toolbar for editing, duplicating, deleting, and reordering (drag the handle, or use the up/down controls).

Figure 2 — The Rise lesson editor (a simplified mock-up, not a real screenshot): blocks stack top to bottom, and you insert new ones between them.

💡 It's autosaving: Rise saves to the cloud continuously as you work — there's no "Save" button to hunt for. That's a feature of being browser-based. It also means your work lives in your Articulate account, so back up important courses by exporting when a project matters (we'll touch on that later in the course).

The Block Library

The Block Library is Rise's palette. When you insert a block, you pick from categories — think of them as aisles in a well-organized store. You don't need to memorize them; you just need to know roughly where to look. Here are the categories you'll see in most versions:

Themes: Fonts, Colors, Cover & Logo

Here's where Rise earns its reputation. A theme controls the look of your entire course from one place — no styling block by block. Open the theme settings (usually a Theme or design panel from the course view) and you can set:

• Colors — an accent/brand color that ripples through buttons, links, and interactive elements across the whole course.
• Fonts — a heading font and a body font from Rise's curated set, chosen for legibility.
• Cover page — the course's title screen: a headline, a description, and a cover photo or color.
• Logo — your organization's logo in the header, for a branded feel.

Because the theme is global, rebranding a finished course is a two-minute job: change the accent color and logo, and the whole course updates. That consistency is exactly what makes Rise courses look polished with so little effort — the analogy is a slide template in PowerPoint, but applied automatically to every block you'll ever add.

💡 Brand tip: If your organization has a hex color for its brand (like #217346), paste it into the theme color field once. Every accent in the course now matches your brand — a small move that makes a course feel official.

Responsive Preview

This is Rise's headline feature and the reason many teams choose it: Rise courses are responsive automatically. The same course reflows to fit a desktop monitor, a tablet, or a phone — you don't build three versions, and you don't fiddle with breakpoints. Blocks that sit side by side on a wide screen stack vertically on a narrow one, images resize, and text stays readable.

Use the Preview button (usually top-right in the editor) to see your course as a learner would. In preview, you can switch device sizes — desktop, tablet, and mobile — to confirm everything looks right at each width. Get in the habit of a quick mobile check before you consider a lesson "done"; a huge share of real learners take courses on their phones.

🎯 Try It: Build Your First Course

📓 Learning Journal

📝 Lesson Summary

🎉 What You've Accomplished

You started your trial, opened Rise, and built a real course from scratch — a titled course, a lesson, three blocks of your own content, a themed accent color, and a mobile preview. You now have the mental model that makes every other Rise menu make sense. That's a genuinely productive first session.

❓ Common Questions at This Stage

🔭 Looking Ahead

In Lesson 6, you'll go deep on the content blocks — Text, Images, Statements, Lists, and Media — and learn how to write and lay out content that's genuinely scannable on any screen.

✅ Before the Next Lesson

• Confirm your trial is active and you can open Rise
• Keep the practice course you built — you'll add to it as Part 2 goes on
• Write this lesson's journal prompt, including your chosen theme color

📚 Additional Resources

• Course Glossary — every term in plain language
• Quick-Reference Cheat Sheet — including the Rise interactive-blocks list
• E-Learning Heroes — see real Rise courses people have built