Articulate 360 vs Frontline: what’s the difference, and what does it mean for instructional designers?
If you work in L&D, there’s a good chance Articulate Frontline has already popped up somewhere on your LinkedIn feed.
And the reaction has been pretty mixed.
Some instructional designers see Frontline as Articulate making it easier for organisations to create training without involving them. Others point out that people outside L&D are already creating this kind of training anyway, and see Frontline as a tool for work that was already happening.
So, what has Articulate actually changed?
At its simplest, Articulate 360 is still the platform most learning teams will recognise, with tools like Storyline and Rise used to design and build digital learning. Frontline is an AI-native product aimed at a different crowd: people outside L&D who need to create training as part of their job.
What is Articulate 360?
Articulate 360 is Articulate’s suite of tools for creating digital learning.
It includes Storyline, which gives learning teams more control over custom interactions and course design, and Rise, which is used to build responsive courses and microlearning.
It’s also worth pointing out that AI is already part of Articulate 360. Articulate has been adding AI features across its authoring tools for some time now, so Frontline isn’t simply “the AI version” of Articulate.
The main difference is that, with Articulate 360, a learning professional is still authoring the learning. They decide what gets built and use tools like Storyline and Rise to create it.
What is Articulate Frontline?
Articulate Frontline is aimed at people who need to create training as part of their job, but wouldn’t necessarily describe themselves as learning professionals.
Articulate says users can provide existing company content, such as documents and presentations, and use it to generate a training kit made up of guides, quick references, scenarios, interactive videos and training decks.
Teams can then update those resources together, share them through trackable links and monitor them through Frontline’s analytics.
So with Frontline, you’re not starting from a blank course. You’re starting with the documents, presentations and knowledge the business already has, and using AI to turn that into training.
Articulate is positioning Frontline for teams like sales, customer support and IT, as well as subject matter experts and frontline trainers.
That’s a very different proposition from what Articulate instructional designers have been using for years.
What does Frontline mean for instructional designers?
Frontline could mean that some straightforward training requests no longer need to go through an instructional designer.
If there’s been a system update, a process has changed, or someone needs a quick ‘how-to’, the person closest to that information may be able to use Frontline to create something themselves. For some of that stuff, this probably makes sense.
Of course, people outside L&D creating training materials themselves isn’t new.
PowerPoint is probably the obvious example (sorry, PowerPoint).
You don’t need to be an instructional designer to learn how to use PowerPoint and put a presentation together. But we’ve all sat through enough bad ones to know that being able to use the software doesn’t automatically make the presentation any good.
Frontline feels similar.
Making the tools easier for more people to use could be genuinely useful. But knowing how to build something and knowing how to make it actually useful for learners are still two different things.
When we work with SMEs, the challenge is rarely a lack of useful content. More often than not, there’s a lot of valuable information to work with - from the SME’s point of view, it probably all feels important because they know the subject inside out.
The harder bit is working out what actually belongs in the learning.
What do they need to know? What do they need to be able to do? What are they getting wrong now? What can be left out of the learning and kept somewhere they can refer back to later?
Sometimes, once you start asking those questions, you realise a course isn’t actually the answer.
That’s the bit Frontline doesn’t really change. It might make it much easier to turn existing content into training, but there’s still a decision to make about what actually needs to be there in the first place.
So, will Frontline replace instructional designers?
We don’t think Frontline can replace instructional designers.
But we can understand why people are worried.
If an organisation sees Frontline as a way to let SMEs create more training themselves, it may also start questioning how many instructional designers it needs, or how much budget should go towards them.
The problem is that creating training and designing learning are not the same job.
Frontline can help someone turn content into training. Instructional design is the work behind deciding what people actually need to learn, what should be included, how they should practise it and what approach is most likely to work.
So the real risk isn’t that Frontline suddenly does the job of an instructional designer. It’s that organisations start treating the two things as if they’re the same.
Need help with your next learning project?
Our instructional designers help you work out what people actually need to know, what they need to do differently, and how the learning should be structured before anything gets built.