Since our founding in 2015, Endurance Learning has grown in nearly every way imaginable. Over the years, we’ve partnered with organizations across industries, developed training for countless topics, and built solutions using tools that have transformed as rapidly as the industry itself.
Yet through it all, one constant has anchored our work: we are always evolving.
As we recently compiled a decade’s worth of elearning examples, patterns began to emerge. Revisiting our early projects (some ambitious, and others humbling!) revealed just how far we’ve come. Every interaction, feedback loop, and even misstep has sharpened our craft.
We proudly call ourselves a learning organization, but this retrospective did more than affirm that title. By categorizing our work, we uncovered tangible evidence of evolution: sleeker designs, more strategic uses of technology, and ultimately deeper learner engagement. Most importantly, we identified the lessons that transformed our approach that we are excited to share.
Sources of Learning
While the team at Endurance Learning brings deep experience and proven processes to every project, we also recognize that each client, audience, and delivery method brings something new to the table. That’s why we build intentional moments of reflection into our workflow. By pinpointing what works and what doesn’t, we don’t just refine the current project, we elevate every solution that follows.
Expert Webinars
Our team members are constantly on the lookout for thought leadership in learning and development. We regularly attend webinars led by experts in instructional design, learning science, accessibility, and emerging technologies. These sessions spark new ideas, validate our current practices, and occasionally challenge us to rethink how we approach tough problems in training.
E-Learning Heroes
We not only try to contribute to the E-Learning Heroes community hosted by Articulate, but we constantly rely on the articles and challenges to learn more about what’s possible in Articulate Storyline and Rise. This has been an incredible resource to see what other instructional designers and elearning developers are creating. Whether we’re pulling inspiration from a weekly challenge or finding new ways to solve a technical hurdle, the community keeps us at the forefront of innovation, constantly refining our craft and pushing our work further.
Project Debriefs
At the end of each project, we collect what went right and what went wrong. This includes everything about the project from timelines and communication to design decisions and client satisfaction. Whether done in a meeting or in written notes, the observations from the whole team often lead to refinements in our process, updates to our templates, or new questions we want to ask our clients earlier in future engagements.
Customer Feedback and Insights
It could be easy to underestimate the value that we get from customers. We’re the experts, right? What can our customers contribute? Lucky for us, a lot! By collaborating with customers we design new approaches to interactivity and often learn about a new technology or approach that we’d never considered.
One of our earliest customers asked us to recommend a platform for virtual meetings. At the time we had used WebEx and GoToMeeting. We gave our client a report showing the benefits and drawbacks of these two tools and a couple of others and she said “Have you heard of this tool called Zoom? Would you mind checking it out?” It may not seem radical now, but Zoom was a completely different experience for international meetings and blew us away. I’m sure we would have learned about it eventually, but it was our customer that spurred us to do more research.
A few years ago, while working with a customer, we developed a set of character illustrations thoughtfully designed with diverse skin tones to reflect our global audience. The client quickly told us that designs would be offensive in some cultures that they work in because they showed shoulders. Despite seeming obvious in hindsight, this perspective hadn’t occurred to us until our customer spoke up.
Trial and Error
Some of our best ideas come from simply trying something new and seeing what happens. We don’t always get it right the first time, but we always learn. From experimenting with interactive formats to testing out new project workflows, we embrace experimentation as part of how we grow.
On a recent project, we were building a tangram activity that would allow teachers to demonstrate an activity online that was generally only available with physical manipulatives. The tangram activity that Elearning Development Manager, Hannah Radant, demonstrated in the article Transfer Hands-On Learning Experiences to Elearning was not easy to create and was a series of failures that led to success. Hannah tried using several different Storyline features and several snippets of Javascript before settling on a working approach.
Insight to Action
While we gather ideas from webinars, communities, and internal reflection, the most meaningful learning happens when our team is focused on delivering a project for a customer. When we’re working with actual content, genuine audiences, and evolving client needs we truly test our assumptions and grow. Behind each example below lies a real project story where something didn’t go as planned, a new insight emerged, or feedback pushed us to pivot.
Each of the examples represents key shifts in perspective and methodology that emerged through our documentation and reflection process.
Interface Design
For several years we were enamored with our own custom menus in Storyline. We didn’t refuse to use the built-in Storyline menu, but we definitely held strong opinions on the design impact of a custom menu versus the built-in Storyline menu. In 2023 we worked with a couple of clients who had existing catalogs of courses and wanted the elearning modules that Endurance Learning built in Storyline to match. We realized that we hadn’t thought much about the Storyline player and started to question our default decision to build our own menus.
Custom menus give us creative freedom and allow us to align visual design with a client’s brand or a specific learning experience. We loved the feeling of full control of the menu structure and the entire learning experience. We didn’t see much value in the embedded menu.
The more we used the built-in player the more we saw the advantages like cleaner layouts, more screen real estate, and baked-in accessibility features such as keyboard navigation and screen reader compatibility.
We also began to push the boundaries of the player structure. While collaborating with our colleagues at Factor3 Digital we created some beautiful layouts that blurred the boundaries between the player and the course. What we developed no longer felt like “another Storyline course.” Rather than choosing one over the other, we’ve learned to make that choice based on what’s best for the client, the learner, and the project.
Designing for Accessibility
We have always prided ourselves on creating accessible courses. Early in our time developing elearning our message was that we used tools that were accessible. We knew enough to do some basic testing.
Interactive elements like drag-and-drops were more common in courses we built and added to the course experience. But as our understanding of accessibility standards deepened and our commitment to inclusive design matured, we’ve become much more purposeful about how we design learning experiences that work for all users.
Considering things like allowing more user control, keyboard navigation, transcript availability, alternative text for images, and ensuring that color is never the only way information is conveyed are examples of deeper conversations we have had. We’re continuing to improve processes to help ensure our work consistently meets WCAG standards, and we understand that this is a continuous process of consideration and improvement.
Template Style Guides
Since we have a full-service team at Endurance Learning, an individual course will go through the hands of several incredible professionals, both employees and contractors. Our general approach had been to create a simple style in Storyline or Rise and hand a storyboard/script to a developer to express their creativity. With the kind of developers we’ve employed, we want to empower them to use every ounce of their creativity.
As we grew our portfolio of work, we spent more time updating creative work that was no longer in line with the client’s needs or other modules in a series. Our team knew that something needed to change.
Building out our vision for the entire project and getting client feedback on Articulate Storyline or Rise elearning templates prior to development has helped us become more consistent. Our team created templates with master slide layout designs or custom themes, branded fonts and colors, and functioning slide layouts or lesson samples.
When we continued to see inconsistencies and mistakes during development we went back to our contract and internal developers to hear more about what they felt they needed within a template to be successful.
From this, Endurance Learning designed Template Style Guides for SL and RISE which are added to the template to provide developers (and QA) with concise expectations and a detailed overview of the design and functionality of the module. Specific elements we currently include in our Template Style Guides include:
- Client-branded fonts and color specifications
- Text formatting
- Module functionality: slide settings, animations, buttons
- Imagery and video details
- Accessibility specifics
- Contact information
Including this style guide in all of our elearning templates (and continuously updating it) has supported all of our developers in producing high-quality and consistent elearning, as well as supporting our team during the QA process without removing the ability for our developers to be creative in how they help meet our clients’ needs.
Leveling Up in Articulate Rise
Everyone knows that Articulate Rise allows for simple, quick elearning development, but the courses tend to look a bit generic. At Endurance Learning, we are continuously brainstorming new ways to make Rise look on-brand for the client and feel more engaging for learners. The transformation of our Rise courses from the past to now has drastically improved. We have upped our Rise design game by:
- Applying client branding including fonts and colors to the overall theme.
- Creating custom backgrounds and transitions. Incorporating shapes and color into the background replaces the square, rigid structure with a more fluid and dynamic visual tone.
- Utilizing blocks in new ways. For instance, a variety of blocks can be used for relevant scenarios or conversation examples. Some we use regularly for this purpose include the timeline block, alternating text and image blocks (pictured), the image carousel block, and image gallery blocks (pictured).
- Incorporating animated GIFs instead of static images. Rise courses are less like traditional elearning and more like a web page. Animated GIFs have allowed us to demonstrate concepts with simple motion.
- Upgrading text with visual interest and animations. Similar to the approach with process graphics, animating bullets adds visual engagement and helps guide the learner’s focus.
- Representing scenarios through animated videos. Simple and short videos allow us to build more variety into scenario interactions.
Trial, Error, Triumph
It is easy to question our decisions when we look at previous projects but the reality is that we’re all growing and changing while the technology changes around us. While we believe in every elearning project we’ve developed, we also know that our best work is always in front of us.
