Arist delivers courses as short conversations inside Slack, so your training arrives in the tool you already have open instead of a separate site you have to remember to visit. You read a lesson, reply in the channel, and pick the course back up whenever you have a few minutes. This guide covers finding your course channel, answering a lesson, staying notified, and wrapping up when the course ends.

Your lessons arrive in a private Slack channel that holds only you and the Arist app. Nobody else on your team is in it, so what you answer stays between you and the course.

Two things identify that channel:

Most organizations set the channel up for you and add you to it, so it is already in your sidebar before your first lesson arrives. If you cannot see it, search for the course name or for arist rather than hunting through your channel list. If that search comes back empty too, the next section covers what to do.

Arist is added to Slack once for the whole workspace rather than separately on each person's account, so there is nothing for you to install and nothing to sign in to. Someone at your organization connects Arist to your Slack workspace and authorizes it, and from then on anyone in that workspace can be enrolled in a course.

So when you cannot find a channel, your organization is the one who adds it. If searching for the course name or for arist finds no channel and no Arist app to message, one of two things is true, and Slack will not tell you which:

The same person unblocks you either way. Ask your training leader, or whoever told you to expect the training, and tell them that Arist does not appear in Slack for you.

Every course opens with a welcome message from the Arist app, which tells you what the course covers, when lessons will arrive, and which keywords you can reply with. Arist adds a short system message underneath telling you when your first lesson is due and reminding you that SUPPORT reaches a human.

Your organization writes that welcome message, so its wording is theirs rather than Arist's.

For the shape of a whole course, from the welcome message to the last lesson, see Taking an Arist Course, Survey, or Nudge.

A lesson arrives as a message from the Arist app, and you answer it the way you answer a colleague. Type your reply in the channel's message box and send it. Most lessons end with a question, and each one tells you what kind of reply it expects, such as a letter for multiple choice or a number for a rating.

You can also reply in a thread on the lesson instead of in the channel. Your answers then stay attached to the lesson they belong to, which keeps a long course readable weeks later.

Answering is what moves you to the next lesson, and it is also how your organization learns whether the training is working. See Taking an Arist Course, Survey, or Nudge for what happens after you reply.

Slack's own unread badge on the channel is your first signal that a lesson has arrived. Depending on how your organization set Arist up, you may also be tagged by name when new content and reminders arrive, which puts the message in your mentions.

If a question has been sitting unanswered, Arist sends a friendly reminder in the same channel. A reminder never means trouble, and replying picks the course straight back up.

Reply PAUSE in the channel and lessons stop arriving until you are ready again. Pausing holds your place instead of cancelling anything, so reply START or RESUME when you want the course back, and it continues where it left off.

Replying STOP does not end your enrollment in Slack. PAUSE is the way to step away. If you need an enrollment cancelled outright, ask your training leader, since only they can remove you from the course.

For every keyword a course understands, including how to reach support, see Using System Keywords.

When you send your last answer, Arist confirms the course is complete and offers to archive the channel for you.

Select Archive Channel to tidy the finished course out of your sidebar. An archived channel is not deleted, and it stays findable in your Slack workspace whenever you want to reread a lesson. You can restore it later to view the content again.

Two things decide when a channel can be archived:

If your organization shares course codes, you can add a course without waiting to be enrolled. Send the code to the Arist app as a message, and Arist enrolls you and sets up the channel from there.

Course codes are one of several ways to enroll yourself. For enrollment links, QR codes, and browsing your organization's course catalog, see Self-Enrolling in a Course.