Road Scholar Builds Role-Based Training for a Global Program Network With Articulate 360

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Turn operational knowledge into training

The pandemic forced Road Scholar to consolidate a patchwork of independently run offices into one standardized way of operating. Training became the tool for making that standardization stick, and that’s the job the Operational Excellence (OpEx) team was built to do.

Today, most OpEx team members are subject matter experts pulled from the operations side of the business rather than trained instructional designers. They’re responsible for turning that operational knowledge into documentation, live instructor-led sessions, and online training for the internal teams who run Road Scholar’s programs—and, more recently, for external partners. Their content spans nearly every function: software walkthroughs, updated sustainability policies for programs that include hotel stays and wildlife encounters, and detailed process training.

Because Road Scholar builds programs roughly two years ahead of when they run, the OpEx team is often training staff on processes that impact future programs, while simultaneously supporting programs that are already in motion. That challenge sharpened significantly with a company-wide initiative to move its entire program portfolio off an aging system and into a new CRM—rolling out in stages, team by team, with each group needing training tailored to its own tasks and point in the transition.

Before Articulate, training at Road Scholar meant live Zoom sessions or recorded videos edited down with voiceovers—approaches that were hard to scale and even harder to update once a policy or system changed. Some teams had experimented with another authoring tool, but none of it could keep pace with what OpEx actually needed: role-specific content built quickly, a way to track who had completed and understood it, and realistic software simulations without a full production cycle every time.

That gap is what sent the team looking for something built to do all three.

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Role-based, easy-to-update training built in Articulate 360

In early 2025, the OpEx team moved beyond documentation and live sessions into building full online courses. Erinn Green, Manager of Operational Excellence, says she briefly tried building courses in another authoring tool. “That pretty quickly determined that we wanted to work in Articulate,” she says. Part of what made the switch easy is that most OpEx team members come from operations, not instructional design—and Rise’s interface lets them start publishing real courses without first becoming design experts.

Team members consistently point to a few of the same things when explaining what makes it work for them. Rise’s interface itself is a big part of the draw: the barrier to entry is low, and updating a published course later is just as simple—which is key for an organization taking an iterative approach to full-scale systems and change.

At an Articuland conference in 2025, Green learned that she could embed Storyline blocks directly into Rise courses for visual cohesion. Combined with Custom Blocks and Code Blocks, this allows the team to create highly customized courses that are visually streamlined and eye-catching—a level of design sophistication that keeps learners engaged in the content. 

Haley Jurena, also a Manager of Operational Excellence, has found Articulate’s flexibility especially useful for making broad topics feel manageable. When she built training for Road Scholar’s sustainability policy update—a topic that spans hotel sustainability, water use, and food waste all in one policy—Rise’s chapter structure let her build a single comprehensive course without it becoming unwieldy. A set of shorter microlearnings handled narrower scenarios, like guidelines for a hiking excursion or a wildlife encounter, that didn’t need the full course to make sense.

“The Custom Blocks have been so much fun,” says Jurena. “They’ve allowed me to create all kinds of different things in Rise.” 

For the CRM migration rollout, Green took a different approach, creating a single branching course built in Storyline and embedding it directly in Rise, which routes each learner to only the tasks relevant to their team. A finance employee, who has only one or two tasks to complete, gets a roughly 15-minute course; someone in the programs department, who needs the full step-by-step picture, gets a course closer to 35–40 minutes—all from one published package instead of a separate course per team. 

“With Articulate, we don’t have to create separate courses for different teams to give each one a tailored experience,” says Green.

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Training that scales and is built to last

Since adopting Articulate, the OpEx team has been able to build, maintain, and scale training well beyond what live sessions and recordings ever allowed. This goes beyond how quickly training gets built—the clearest evidence of that shift is in how people are actually reacting to the training.

When OpEx shared its CRM migration rollout training with the executive team, the feedback was that the course was so clear a brand-new employee could take it without any additional context. On the sustainability training, staff were delighted by the eye-catching visuals, and reported that the design made them want to complete the course. 

The impact has also shown up in time-savings. Previously, to get learners up to speed on foundational information before diving into hands-on work, the team often needed to provide several hours of instructor-led training. Pivoting to e-learning courses built in Articulate has saved the team time both in facilitation hours and in preparing courses for launch—all while providing a more straightforward and succinct experience for learners.

Ultimately, the team’s work is preserving a crucial part of Road Scholar’s company culture. With staff who often stay decades, a lot of institutional knowledge lived only in people’s heads, and OpEx’s courses are turning that knowledge into training that new hires and external partners can access consistently, in service of a company built around lifelong learning.

With Articulate 360, Road Scholar builds and maintains standardized training for a global network of programs and partners.