Google Drive Users: Move Your Hosted E-Learning Examples to a New Server!

Note: This week’s challenge only applies to users who have challenge examples hosted with Google Drive. This isn’t an official challenge, so it won’t have a challenge number or recap associated with it. If you don’t have any examples on Google Drive, you can take the week off or catch up on a previous challenge.

Google Drive Web Hosting is Going Away

We’re big fans of Google Drive’s hosting option. Sure it’s a little wonky to grab the right link for sharing, but overall it’s one of the fastest and easiest ways for course designers to share their work.

But that’s about to end.

Click the image to learn more about Google's announcement

Google announced it’s pulling the plug on Drive’s hosting service. After August 31, 2016, your e-learning portfolio, challenge, and demos will no longer work.

With more than two thousand challenge demos hosted on Google Drive, I’m anxious to get those links updated.

Challenge of the Week

This week, your challenge is to move your Google Drive–hosted e-learning examples to a new hosting provider. Published examples on Google Drive will stop working August 31, 2016.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to move your source files (.story, .pptx, .png, etc.) to a new provider—just your published examples. Google Drive is still a great option for sharing downloads and source files.

Send Me Your Updated Links

As you move your challenge examples to a new server, please use the form below to notify me of the updated links. I’ll update the challenge recaps so your examples are preserved.

Click image to view the form

Amazon S3

We use S3 for most of our demos, downloads, and source files. It’s cheap, reliable, and serves files faster than Google Drive and Dropbox. The only downside is that it can seem a little geeky if you’ve never uploaded files to a web server.

Thankfully, Tom posted an article and video tutorial that covers everything you’ll need to know about S3. Check out his post and let us know if you have any questions.

Dropbox

If you have a paid or Pro account with Dropbox, you can enable the public folder to share published courses. While Dropbox is one of the easiest ways to share published courses, it’s not optimized for web sharing.

This means your shared courses will load and play slower than they would with S3 or a typical web hosting service. You can learn more about Dropbox’s solution on their site.

FTP and Web Hosting

Ultimately, you should have your own blog or website where you can upload your examples. This requires a small financial commitment for the domain name ($10-$20/yr) and hosting ($50-$100/yr), but the benefits far outweigh the costs.

Here’s a quick overview of how FTP works to upload published courses to your own website or blog:

Last Week’s Challenge:

Before you scramble to update your hosted examples, take some time to check out the brainy JavaScript examples your fellow community members shared in last week’s challenge:

Storyline RECAP #132: Challenge | Recap

Wishing you a drive-tastic week, E-Learning Heroes!

New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.