Articulate Presenter and Articulate Quizmaker have always had the option to publish to LMS. And, as Tom noted back in November, now Engage ‘09 gives you the option to publish to LMS, too. This post will cover the basics for publishing Studio ‘09 content for your LMS.
A Consistent Authoring Experience
As Studio ‘09 customers know, one of the nice things about using the products in the suite is the similar look and feel of each product’s interface — from the Office-style Ribbon toolbar:
…to the Publish Success dialog:
A key point to note in the Publish Success dialog is the option to zip your published output. In previous versions of Presenter and Quizmaker, if you published to LMS, your output would be zipped by default. With the Studio ‘09 products, make sure to select the Zip button if you’re publishing to a SCORM-compatible LMS.
Here are the Steps to Publish for Your LMS From Studio ’09
Whether you’re working in Presenter ‘09, Quizmaker ‘09, or Engage ‘09, the steps are the same.
- Go to Publish -> LMS.
- In the LMS drop-down menu, specify the elearning standard supported by your LMS — SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, or AICC (we’ll use SCORM 1.2 in this example since it’s the most common):
- Input your desired Reporting and Tracking Options to send to your LMS:
- Click Publish and wait for your content to be converted to Flash:
- When you see the Publish Success dialog, click the option to Zip:
- In the New Zip File dialog, specify the location and file name for your zip file and click Save.
- After the save is complete, the folder where you saved your zip file will automatically open:
That’s it!
If you’re curious what’s inside the SCORM zip package you just created, it’s the standard published output files and folders (player.html, player, data, etc.). In addition, there are some files and a folder specific to LMS publishing:
Leave these files and structure intact. In fact, there’s really no need to unzip the package… it can usually just lead to trouble.
Getting the .Zip to Your LMS
Next, all you need to do is the following:
- Login to your LMS as an admin or author.
- Create a new content item in your LMS (often referred to as a SCO for “Sharable Content Object” — that’s the “SCO” part of “SCORM”).
- Upload the SCORM zip package you just created to this SCO in your LMS.
- Your LMS will do the rest, automatically unzipping the content after uploading, and reading your imsmanifest.xml file to obtain necessary tracking and reporting details, along with other metadata related to your course, quiz, survey, or interaction (it should also automatically launch your content via index_lms.html).
If you run into any issues with getting your content to work in your LMS, your first stop should be the blog entry I wrote last year: 9 Ways to Troubleshoot Articulate & LMS Issues.
You can also contact your LMS provider directly with any questions specific to the upload portion of this tutorial.
New Features in Studio ’09 LMS Publishing
No entry about new products would be complete without highlighting a few key changes in the new versions from our old products:
- LMS Support in Engage ’09: As noted earlier, you can now create a learning object directly from Engage ‘09 to track in your LMS, as you would a course, quiz, or survey. Just look for the LMS publish option in Engage ‘09.
- Resume Support in Quizmaker ’09: As with Presenter ‘09, you can now opt to have your users resume a quiz from the point where they left off. To enable, look for the resume section in Player Templates: Navigation.
- Option to Disable Resume in LMS: If your LMS supports resume (the cmi.suspend_data call), a course will always resume using the LMS’s resume functionality when you have the Prompt to resume on presentation restart feature enabled. What’s new in Presenter ‘09 is that if you uncheck that box, Presenter ‘09 will no longer send cmi.suspend_data to the LMS (you told us you wanted the option not to resume in your LMS, and we listened). There’s also a new option called When running in LMS, ignore Flash cookie. As noted in our documentation on the topic: “If checked, the course will always resume by using the LMS’ bookmarking feature (if your LMS supports it). If unchecked, your content will resume using the LMS’ resume data, but will use the Flash cookie if the LMS does not support resume.” In other words, you should always be able to get the resume functionality you desire.
- Launch in New Window: In old versions of Presenter, you might run into tracking issues if you launched your course in a new window via your LMS. Now, with Presenter ‘09, you have the option to safely launch your course in a new window via your LMS and rest assured that tracking will work as expected.
Saba 5.4 customers: If you run into any tracking issues, please refer to this Knowledge Base article to learn more.
Finally, if you need assistance troubleshooting issues with your specific LMS, contact Rustici Software, a consulting firm you may want to hire to assist you.
[...] Publish to LMS with Studio ’09 [...]
» Build Interactive Scenarios in Presenter ’09 - Articulate - Word of Mouth Blog | Posted at 10:32 am on February 4th, 2009 | #