Publishing to an LMS with Adobe Captivate - SCORM Tutorial

- In this chapter, we're going to explore publishing SCORM-compliant e-learning courses to an LMS. And we're going to use some of the most popular e-learning authoring software out there, beginning with this one, Captivate. I'm using Captivate 8, so if you have it, you can launch it. You can get a free trial as well. And I'm using the exercise file titled KE_Orientation.cptx. You'll find it in the Chapter Two folder in the subfolder labelled Captivate of your exercise files. With this open, we can see there are a number of slides. There are interactions. We see buttons and down towards the end, if we scroll down, you'll notice there is a quiz that's going to have scoring. That's important with Captivate. And if you are going to include a quiz and quiz questions that are going to be scored, they need to be able to report to an LMS here in Captivate. I'll talk more about this in the next chapter, but for now, what we need to do before we can go to publish this is to make sure it's ready to report our quiz to an LMS. And we do that by going to the Quiz menu, give it a click. Then, select Quiz Preferences. Now, this opens up our Preferences dialogue with Reporting selected under the Quiz category. And you can see, we have some options that are faded in the background for LMS options, SCORM compliance, etc., but none of that's available to us until we enable Reporting for this project. So, clicking that checkbox at the very top makes all of these other options accessible, including right at the top, choosing our LMS. Click this drop-down, you'll see Moodle right at the top, open source, free, online, right on the web, so you can explore that option if you don't have your own LMS. And there's plenty of training on Moodle at Lynda.com. You might have your own Internal Server, using your own LMS or you may subscribe to Other Standard LMSs. There's Adobe Connect and Questionmark Perception if you want to access those, they're right here on the list. Otherwise, you'll need to choose Other Standard LMS if you don't see yours on this list. I'm gonna go with that default. Next, we get to choose the Standard of SCORM that we want to use. And with 1.2 selected, you can see down below that we have some Status Representations options. Is it going to be Incomplete--> Complete? Or with the quiz, do we want to show Incomplete, or whether they Passed or Failed to show status in our course. Also, when they successfully complete the course is it going to be based on User Access, which limits the options to Slide Views. You can see the Quiz doesn't even have a selection. But with Slide Views, we have more options, but before we get to all of this, we can also choose our Standard of SCORM. And you'll need to be compatible with your LMS here. So, you talk to your LMS administrator, they say, "We have SCORM 2004." So, you make that selection. Notice AICC and TinCan are also available here for future, but let's go with SCORM 2004. We can even configure by clicking this, choose the version of SCORM 2004. So, the edition you can see, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. Again, my administrator says we're using the 2nd Edition, we select that radio button. And then, down below, the administrator of the LMS will also provide you with an Identifier that you would type in here. So, the course ID, basically. Let's say, he gives us a course I.D. of 010412. And the Title wouldn't be Captivate E-Learning Course, it would actually be KE Orientation, that's what I'm gonna use. I could add a description to be more descriptive, so when I look at a list of courses on the LMS, this one would stand out. And this is our first version of the course, but we can have versions, which is nice. With this checked off, if we update our course, we can keep older versions and have newer ones available to our learners. Now, down below, you'll see a SCO section, SCO. Those are the Sharable Content Objects, and we have Identifiers that would be provided to us by our LMS administrator for those as well. And we would give them a title. So, we'll leave those as the default because that's information you would get from your LMS administrator and click OK. Now, we're down into some of the options, so Completion Criteria. What shows completion in our course? Well, if it's User Access that we select, you can see it can be Slide Views. So, once they view it, 100% of our slides, or it could be a Quiz. Now, with User Access, we're limiting the amount of reporting to the LMS. With Slide Views, with that selected, now we can use Slide Views and/or the Quiz. So, nothing's complete until the Quiz is passed, or attempted, or maybe is passed, or the attempt limit's reached. So, in other words, if they're allowed to take the Quiz three times, once they've reached that limit, they are done or once they've passed it, they are done. That's an option, I like that one. What is the criteria for success? Well, again, we can go with User Access or Slide Views. With Slide Views, you can see Quiz is Passed because of what we selected up above. So, that represents success, once they pass the quiz, not just Slide Views, but we do have that option here as well. So the Data To Report, Interaction Data. Interacting with the course is all going to be reported to the LMS. And once the LMS is initialized, what do users see on their screen? You can see the word Loading. You can put whatever you like in here, like Accessing LMS or Initializing LMS, that's up to you. I'm going to leave Loading in there. And before we click OK, down below, there is a link that will launch your browser to show you which LMSs are verified by Adobe. You'll see it open up, and there's a list of LMSs that are validated. And you can see "to ensure Captivate content works out of the box." So, if you're using one these, great! Let's switch back now to our Preferences, click OK. And now we're ready to publish this course by going to the Publish button here in the toolbar. We can publish it to our computer. It's gonna create a package that we would then present to our LMS administrator, and they would work with that to get it up on the LMS. It could be published for devices as well if learners are going to be able to use tablets and smart phones. Or there it is, Publish to Adobe Connect if you're connected and you have an actual membership or subscription to Adobe Connect. So, I'm gonna choose Publish To My Computer. And now you can see, I can publish is as... There's the default, HTML / Shockwave Flash. There's a Video or an Executable. So again, working with your LMS administrator, typically it's gonna be the default, HTML_5. The Project Title is going to be created automatically. You can choose the location. By default, it's going to your Documents folder in a subfolder called My Adobe Captivate Projects. And Zip Files is probably selected by default. And that's the file or files that you will provide to the LMS administrator to get it connected, so that learners will have access to it through their LMS connection. Output Format, you can see Shockwave Flash and HTML 5 options, full screen, etc. These are all things you'll want to decide for the look and feel of your course before you go to the Publish button to publish it. Notice that for me, the content expires because I'm using a trial version of Captivate. If you downloaded a trial version, you'll see something like this as well. If you purchase Captivate 8, you won't see this message and you won't have to click OK before the publishing progress window open up to show you how your course is being published. So, at the end, we'll have that content in the default folder that we provide to our LMS administrator. They get it up on the LMS, and it becomes a course accessible by learners when they log in.