How do you keep your course size down?

Feb 02, 2012

We have a series of courses that we've created with a lot of video, quizzes and engage interactions. For example, one course has:

2 Engage Interactions
5 Quizzes (4 include short 2-minute videos)
3 additional 2-minute videos

This course itself publishes to 138 MB.

The courses are already broken into smaller modules (3 modules total, each about 30 min long). Other than breaking them up and/or removing videos, what could we do to reduce the file size?

We've discussed linking out to the videos, but our company blocks YouTube. We've also discussed publishing to AICC and hosting them on a file server, but we do not have the budget to purchase a server. Any other suggestions?

7 Replies

Brian Houle

12 years ago02/02/12 at 10:24 am (UTC)

Hi, Christina:

What format/size are the videos? Off the top of my head, I might suggest trying to reduce the size of the videos. (I suspect, though, you've got them pretty slim already).

Christina Stephenson
Author

12 years ago02/02/12 at 10:48 am (UTC)

I just went through and converted one course's videos from mp4 to flv. It brought the file down from 138mb to 52mb. However, the remaining courses I have are (before converting videos):

193mb
130mb
63mb
50mb
6mb (this one doesn't have any video - yay!)

Even if I compress them all, all together I estimate they will still be around 300mb, and that will take up half our bandwidth on our LMS. Any other ideas?

Brian Houle

12 years ago02/02/12 at 11:22 am (UTC)

If you can reduce the resolution of the videos to something like 320x240, that might help. The problem is you have to decide when you've reduced the quality of your elements far enough. The only other option I can think of is to play with the Quality in the Publish window, and see if that helps.

Ron Price
Partner

12 years ago02/02/12 at 11:34 am (UTC)

Have you experimented with these on your LMS yet? The fact that Articulate only loads three slides at a time tends to alleviate the pressure on bandwidth.

PPT compresses pictures by default, but you can go in and further compress your pictures to lighten the course size. Also, for any graphics that repeat on multiple slides, you may want to consider using the Master Slide to house those.

That might help, as well.

Give a good day!

Brian Houle

12 years ago02/02/12 at 1:27 pm (UTC)

Ron raises a good point: is bandwidth your issue, or the size of the SCORM packages on disk? Bandwidth ought not to be an issue, but if your LMS service provider limits the size of your SCORM package uploads, you might could discuss alternate upload or quota increase options with them.