Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Having trouble publishing your course to your LMS?


Many beginners, especially the not so technical ones, seem to struggle initially in publishing the course material successfully onto an LMS. All that hard work of collecting those PowerPoints, documents, videos and test materials in order to create the perfect course for your customers washed away in an instant when the LMS fails to read your course or the quiz not reporting as you had wanted it to. You probably knew beforehand that you had to publish the course from your course development tool as a SCORM output but you did not see an option anywhere and you were too quick to publish the course.

There begins the saga of endless email communications with the support staff. It will settle down ultimately and you will learn the process eventually but the question us: Was that all necessary? That is the question we are  trying to address here. After all publishing your course to any LMS that supports SCORM/AICC (or any similar standards) should not be that difficult?

Here are four simple steps that you might bear in mind before you build a course for an LMS. The tool
does not matter here as long as it meets the above mentioned standards.

1. Publish to an LMS and not as MP4 or FLVs

The publish settings in the course creation tool will most certainly have an option to publish to an LMS and so identifying those screens or switches in the tool is the key. The quick publish options in some tools might take you through a different route. Avoid those and make sure you publish to an LMS. A zip file might be the most suitable output format for an LMS.