Linking to location (Storyline)

Oct 05, 2021

Hello All,

I would like to create a course which will have several very large tutorial files.  It doesn't make sense to upload them to the LMS in Azure as we need to pay for bandwidth cost.  It would make more sense to store them on a read-only local network drive.

Therefore, I would like to open a folder located on S:\Tutorial which will contain all the files required.  


I would also like to link to each individual file so students can download the files on the go, as and when they need them.

Can anyone help with this?  It should be pretty straight forward, however I cannot work out why it wont work.

3 Replies
Ren Gomez

Hi Craig,

Thanks for reaching out, and happy to help clarify this question:

How can I share a published course with learners hosted on a network drive?

Viewing published courses on your local hard drive or a network drive isn't supported. Security restrictions in these environments can cause various features in your courses to fail, which helps explain why you might be running into issues.

If you're unable to upload your course to an LMS due to cost, publishing to the web and hosting the course on your organization's web server is the next best alternative. Keep in mind, you won't be able to track learner data if hosted anywhere outside of an LMS.

I hope this helps!

📚Related Resources:

Craig Wolfenden

Hello Ren,

Thank you for your reply.

The website will be run on Moodle as the LMS via Microsoft Azure platform.  Will browser security still be a problem?

When linking to a resource, I was not sure whether to use the full UNC file name i.e. \\Server\Share or if I could refer to it locally i.e. H:\

Of course, if browser security is going to block the link then we will need to think of a new way of doing things. 

Ren Gomez

Hi Craig,

Thanks for the follow-up, and apologies for the misunderstanding! I see that you're hosting the course itself on an LMS, but you prefer to save the tutorial files linked in the course externally to not take up additional file space.

I'd suggest connecting with your IT team and ensuring wherever the files are saved; they are publicly available to your learners in a read-only format. Once you save the files in the appropriate location, you can grab the link to attach as a resource. 

You may have to test this in your LMS environment so that you're confident the links are functioning as expected!