Heads Up! Articulate Courses Will No Longer Work on Dropbox

Community Team
By Community Team

Heads Up! Articulate Courses Will No Longer Work on Dropbox

Dropbox just announced that they’ll stop supporting HTML in files hosted in Dropbox folders as of October 3, 2016 for free accounts. What does this mean for you? If you're using Dropbox links to host published Articulate courses on the web, viewers will no longer be able to see your content. If you have a Dropbox Pro account, you'll have a bit longer to transition: HTML support will end September 1, 2017. Unfortunately this comes right on the heels of Google Drive’s decision to do the same thing.

We know some E-Learning Heroes community members loved the quick and easy option of hosting their courses on Dropbox or Google Drive. But don’t worry! We’ve got a few other quick and easy options for you:

  • Amazon Web Services: AWS specializes in hosting web content, so it’s a great, reliable way to share your published courses. And good news: the first 5 GB you post to AWS are free! Tom Kuhlmann created this helpful tutorial to show you how to post your content to AWS.  
  • Your own website: If you already have a website, it’s simple to add courses to your own webhost. Here’s a tutorial that shows you how.

Special Option for E-Learning Challenge Participants

If you depend on Dropbox to post your weekly E-Learning Challenge projects, you have one more option! Just send us your published files and we’ll host them for you on our servers.

Just go to this link and share your zipped output with your first and last name and challenge number in the file name, like this: David_Anderson_Challenge122.zip. We’ll post the project on our servers and send you the link.

Questions? Suggestions for other file hosting solutions? Share them in the comments!

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27 Comments
Rachel Craig
over 7 years ago09/01/16 at 6:10 pm (UTC)
Hi! I don't have the option to use AWS, because I have Articulate on my work computer, and downloads are pretty tightly controlled by our IT team. That was why I liked Google Drive so much! Alas. Can I use the Dropbox option to upload my files directly to your server even if I don't have a Dropbox account? Or should I just e-mail my challenge entries to someone on the Articulate staff instead? Thanks, Rachel
Mat Beecher
over 7 years ago09/01/16 at 7:40 pm (UTC)
Double sigh. Nothing worse than a good solution evolving into/becoming the problem! I continue to shake my fist in the general direction of Dropbox, but look forward to learning about newer, more innovative solutions for affordable hosting. AWS will likely work for my [currently small] portfolio, and it seems like the pricing is scaled to meet and grow with one's needs, so this may be an alright solution for the time being. That being said, I still hope to hear more about what others are doing...
David Anderson
over 7 years ago09/01/16 at 7:50 pm (UTC)

I like AWS because it's cheap, fast, and the most reliable option. The downside is that the URL doesn't always make it easy to find the source of the example. Example: http://articulate-heroes-authoring.s3.amazonaws.com/Examples/Storyline/SL2/Interactive-exploration/story.html Personally, I would always want my portfolio projects on my own website so the examples are visually connected to my domain name. A good example of this is Jackie Van Nice who always posts her examples in a sub directory on her website: http://www.jackievannice.com/?p=175071340 Another option is to create a landing page on your own domain for your examples like Montse does: http://elearningdesigner.com/storyline/medical-starter/story.html This helps users immediately know who created the example and where... Expand

Mark Weingarten
over 7 years ago09/01/16 at 9:34 pm (UTC)
Hi All. A quick suggestion for hosting courses on your own site is to rename the story.html file to index.html. That way, your url will be cleaner e.g. mindstreamelearning.com/ecloo On a barely related note, a really nice tool for lightboxing courses on your wordpress site is ilightbox. It took me a bit to figure it out, but it's responsive and super clean.
Veronica Budnikas
over 7 years ago09/02/16 at 1:46 am (UTC)
Great tip Mark! I host samples on my website and my blog. For my blog, I use a Wordpress plugin that allows you to upload published Articulate content and show them nicely in an iframe or lightbox (I like the lightbox option): http://www.elearningfreak.com/ There is a free version, but has a file limit of 2MB. The premium version is $129. Here is an example of how it looks: http://veronicab.com.au/board-game-storyline2/ (scroll to the play button towards the bottom)
Sebastin Francis
over 7 years ago09/02/16 at 6:45 pm (UTC)
Alas, the ever changing tech landscape! I use Amazon AWS and it works well (you can get the Cloudberry Explorer desktop app to make managing the upload and sharing of courses to AWS easier). Another one that I use to do a full LMS functionality testing for a course is SCORM Cloud (their free account allows about 100MB of storage and up to 10 active registrations per month: https://cloud.scorm.com/sc/guest/SignUpForm). I like playing around with their xAPI/ Tincan API sandbox as well. But agree with the others that it's inconvenient and frustrating to keep changing our "habits" quite often and a personal website might be the best long-term solution/investment.
Nalin Dubey
over 7 years ago09/05/16 at 10:45 pm (UTC)
I am really surprised that why are people so much desperate for totally free options and feeling sorry for one of them getting extinct. Web Hosting is one of the cheapest things today. Though not free but costs quite little for a year. :-) Plus the advantage of having a desired domain/folder name. Sharing E-Learning courses is a great cause and a purpose of high importance to buy web hosting. One usually spends an amount equal to yearly web hosting on casual things like daily snacks. Choose GoDaddy, HostGator or any one of the hundreds of web hosting providers and continue your E-Learning development work non stop. Cheers..!
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