How do I publish my course on a website or share it by e-mail?

Laila,

To share a course publicly, I generally upload the entire folder (not a zipped file) to the public folder within dropbox. Then, right click on story.html and select Dropbox > Copy Public Link and that is the link that should be shared.

An excellent tutorial on this is located here. I would recommend taking a look at the link.

I hope this helps!

Keepin' the joy,

Patti

Laila,

Another cool way to quickly view your content is to use Articulate's tempshare service.

Simply zip your content up and load!

http://tempshare.articulate.com/

Mike

Thank you Patti and Mike. The tempshare is a good temporary solution for 10 days, but I still want to know how to publish my course on my web site - for ever and ever!

The Dropbox solution also sounded like a good temporary solution, but unfortunally I did not get any Copy public link- alternative from the drop down menu. Why is that? I s every program trying to mess with my mind? I´m about to give up my career in e-learning before it even begins. :(

Laila,

Don't give up! Be persistent - it pays off.

You can't really publish a course "on your web site" unless you have an LMS that you use or upload all of the files in a subfolder somewhere within your website and reference those on your website. If you are familiar with HTML and your website structure, it could be accomplished, but I'm not sure why you wouldn't just use a service like Dropbox and leave it there. For example, on my website, I have samples of my work. All of them "live" on dropbox and are easily accessed via a link on my website (http://learningreinvented.net/portfolio-highlights/). 

Dropbox has several folders. To get the Copy Public Link, ensure the files have been copied to the "Public" folder (there are private folders, etc.) and also ensure you are selecting "story.html" and not a folder to share. 

I hope this helps! If it doesn't, let us know what happens. Also, if it does, let us know. ;)

Keepin' the joy,

Patti

Thansk again, Patti. I´m beginning to understand that e-learning is not made to be published on web sites for anyone to see. I´m not ready to get my own LMS yet or try to go deep into the HTML-code.

In that light, yes, the dropbox-solution sounds like a great alternative. But I swear I can´t get the Copy Public Link-alternative to appear even though I do everything correctly: I publish the files to my public folder and I select the correct story.html-link and not the folder.

I even tried to reinstall Dropbox, but to no use.

Well, at least I have a temporary solution for now thanks to tempshare. I´ll try again tomorrow to make it work with the web site and/or Dropbox. I´ll keep you posted!

Hello Laila,

Since you are on a tight schedule you should just upload your output to Dropbox for now, as stated above. If the "dropbox application" process isn't working for you, then you can try uploading directly through www.dropbox.com.

On the other hand, I see no reason why you can't upload to a web server using FTP. All you need is an FTP application (such as Filezilla for example) and your FTP Username, Password and server address. You did mention you don't have that info handy, but you can usually get them easily.

Most of this information can be found through the control panel of your webhost. Some webhosts even create an FTP username and password by default (again you will have to find what that is through the control panel of your webhost). If you don't have a username and password already made, you should be able to create one through that same control panel.

Once you have that information, fire up the FTP application of your choice, connect to your server and copy the entire output folder to any folder inside your domain. You should then be good to go.

Hope it helps,
Alex

Laila,

If you have a relatively new DropBox account, then the process has changed for getting the public link.  And I agree with Alex in that you can certainly load your eLearning course directly to your website.  The process can seem a little bit overwhelming at first, but once you understand the process, it's really quite simple.  

Now, it sounds like you have a website already.  Is this a site that you created on your computer and then loaded to your server?  If so, loading your eLearning course will be pretty similar.  Typically, you can use an FTP client or simply manually load them.  

Here's what I'd do (this is a generic solution and may not work)...

1. Log-in to your web server

2. Go to the folder where your website is being served up. Typically, a "public html" folder or something similar.

3. Inside that Public folder, create a new folder (give it a unique name. For now, we'll call it "course")

4. Manually load your published course files into that folder

5. Now, to test, type in http://www.yourwebsitename.com/course/story.html

Again, the architecture of where you have to place that course folder may vary...but the process should work.

Mike

Thank you so much Alex and Mike.

I just got Dropbox to work for me. Turns out I didn´t mark the story.htlm so that it turned blue before I right clicked. That meant the program thought I wanted to share the whole folder, and then you don´t get the alternative Copy Public Link, of course. Embarrasing, but I´m glad it finally works, and I wanted to share my mistake in case somebody else out there is as dumb as I am and needs a little help.

I am going to try again with publishing directly on my web site. I´m sure it´ll work with the new tips. The only thing that might be a problem is that I didn´t create it myself from scratch, but I used an online Create Your Own Website-site, and I suspect that means I don´t have as much control over it as I would otherwise, and they kind of hide away all the technical details that a normal user isn´t interested in, since it´s supposed to be super simple. But I will ask them to help me and I´m sure it will be possible.

Thansk again!

Laila

All this is great info!  What file would I target for an Articulate Presenter Course?

Hey Scott,

I have found that Amazon Web Service works great (AWS). It's free for a year and has generous usage. If you go over, it's not very much. Also, I recommend that you download and install Cloudberry Explorer, which will help with transferring files. It may take you a couple of hours to watch tutorials on Cloudberry, start your AWS acount, and transfer your files, but it's totally worth it.

Once you transfer your files, you can right click on the .html file for Presenter (which would launch your course) and you get a web URL. You can test it there or copy it onto a new document to test. Works great! 

Also, if any of your courses have audio and you use Chrome, you'll need to update your courses by installing Articulate Updater. Chrome made changes, again recently, preventing audio from playing. 

Hope this helps!

Lisa