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Add an interactive timeline block including embedded images and video
Overview
Name of explainer: Add an interactive timeline block including embedded images and video
Creative theme: Rapid elearning content development
Software used: Articulate Rise 360
User level: BEGINNER
This is explainer 3 of 6 in this series
This series includes:
- Create an Articulate account and create a new Rise 360 microlearning project
- Explore Rise’s content blocks and add text and image blocks to the project
- Add an interactive timeline block including embedded images and video
- Add a process block and create step by step user instructions
- Add a knowledge check including multiple choice and ‘matched pairs’ questions
- Export the learning content to a PDF, to HTML and to an LMS
The Software
This series of explainers uses Articulate Rise 360, a popular application for quickly building and deploying online learning. It’s part of a suite of programs called ‘Articulate 360’ which also includes Articulate (a traditional, slide-based e-learning creation application) and the online review and commenting platform Review 360. Articulate refers to Rise as ‘Rise 360’ – We use the terms ‘Rise’ and ‘Rise 360’ interchangeably throughout this series.


You can download a free 30 day demo version of Rise 360 from Articulate’s website. This gives you access to a fully-functioning copy of Rise to use alongside our explainers.
Over the course of six explainers we’ll use Rise 360 to create a short ‘microlearning’ product introducing users to Generative AI is and showing them how they can interact with ChatGPT. We’ll include a short quiz at the end, and show how to export the short ‘course’ from Rise 360 to a range of formats including a PDF and html files to upload and use on our own website.
The finished product
This is how our Rise 360 microlearning project looks at the end of this explainer series. Welcome to ‘An introduction to Generative AI!’
The example above shows a near-final product based on the content included at the end of this series. It would be subject to final changes and finessing before being released to clients.
Here’s the PDF version of the above microlearning, downloaded from Rise 360 at the end of this series:
The pre-requisities
This is a BEGINNER workflow explainer series. Ideally you already need to be familiar with simple text and image editing.
Why would I do this?
A visual TIMELINE can be a great way show a sequence of key events over time. This is easy to accomplish using Rise 360’s TIMELINE block. Additional ‘slots’ can be added to add as many ‘events’ as you need.
Let’s do it!
Click the play icon to watch this video. Subtitles are available – Click the settings cog at the bottom right for options. You can also watch this video full-screen by clicking the full-screen icon at the bottom right.
Use our example content
You can download the example content used in this explainer below. You’re welcome to use it for personal use. Please do not share or distribute these assets.
The image and text added to timeline block 1:
November 2022
The public release of ChatGPT 3 by OpenAI
GPT is short for ‘generative pre-trained transformer’, but for most of us chatGPT is simply known as the first ‘intelligent’ chatbot, which provided a glimpse into the AI future through its ability as a chatbot to participate in ‘intelligent’ chats and create poetry, translate languages, and even generate code. Its release marked a significant leap in natural language processing capabilities. The model was trained on a huge, diverse range of internet text, though questions have been raised about copyright and whether its training data is a legitimate source.. The stunning success of ChatGPT left its rivals scrambling for a simple, cost-effective response.

The video and text added to timeline block 2:
Feb 2023
Runway releases the first publicly available text to video model
In February 2023 Runway.ml released the first commercial and publicly available video-to-video and text-to-video generation model accessible to all via a web browser. Using only a short text prompt, a user can generate short video clips. Alternatively, a starting frame/image can be uploaded and used as the first frame of the video clip.
Prompt used to generate the clip below: ‘A person wearing a futuristic VR headset standing in front of a futuristic stand in a modern expo hall’.
The embedded video and text added to timeline block 3:
Feb 2024
OpenAI releases SORA, the next generation text-to-video model.
The SORA model ups the ante and generates videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s original prompt. Although not publicly available at the time of writing, this model represents the next generational leap, showing the level of realism achievable through careful prompting (and significant computing power!) This model is not available to the public at this time and would likely be expensive to use . It offers a tantalising glimpse of things to come!
Good to know
As seen in the explainer, an individual ‘event’ on the timeline can include a combination of text, an uploaded or embedded image or video, and an audio file. An appropriate mix will depend on the topic you’re covering!

Where to next?
Remember, this is part of a series of explainers for this application – Join us again for the other explainers in the series 🙂
Notes and updates
There are no notes or advisories at this time. This video explainer was last updated in April 2024. This page was last updated in April 2024.
We at pixels.cool are not responsible for the content of any external webpages or software downloaded from third party sites. Links are included in good faith at the time of writing. All explainer content is compiled in good faith using processes and methods used by the team. Modern software offers users many ways in which to accomplish a single task, and for reasons of clarity we choose not to refer to multiple options. All computer users should run up to date virus / security software at all times to minimise risks of data loss.
This is number 3 of 6 explainer videos in this series. Make sure you check out the others!

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