Storyline 3: Publishing a Course for Web Distribution

If you want learners to access an Storyline 3 course over the internet or a private intranet, and if you don’t need to track their progress, then web publishing is for you. (If you do need tracking capabilities, publish for LMS instead.)

1. Enter Title, Description, and Folder Location
2. Enter Additional Project Info (Optional)
3. Adjust the Player Properties and Quality Settings
4. Choose to Publish a Slide, a Scene, or the Entire Course
5. Publish
6. Distribute Your Published Course

Step 1: Enter Title, Description, and Folder Location

1. Go to the Home tab on the Storyline ribbon and click Publish.
2. When the Publish window appears, select the Web tab on the left.
   
   
3. Enter the Title the way you want it to appear in your published output. It defaults to the name of your project file. (Changing the title won't affect the name of your project file.) The maximum length for a project title is 80 characters.
4. Use the Description field to document the purpose of your course. It won't appear in your published output.
5. Use the Folder field to choose where you want to publish your course—for example, your computer desktop. Click the ellipsis button (...) to browse to a location. Storyline will create a new folder in that spot with all the files needed to operate your course.
   
   Important: Always publish to your local hard drive. Publishing to a network drive or a USB drive can cause problems with your published output due to latency. After publishing to your local hard drive, upload the output to a web server for testing and distribution.

Step 2 (Optional): Enter Additional Project Info

Click the ellipsis button (...) next to the Title field to define additional project information. Currently, this information is for your reference only. It won’t be visible in your published output.

1. The Title and Description fields are the same as those on the Publish window (see the previous step).
2. The image below the Title field will be the course thumbnail in the Articulate Mobile Player library. By default, Storyline uses an image of the first slide in your course, but you can choose a different image. Just click the hyperlinked text below the image, then select a different slide or click Picture from File to choose an image on your hard drive.
3. Enter values for Author, Email, Website, Duration, Date, Version, and Keywords if you'd like.
4. The Identifier applies only to content published for LMS.

When you're finished customizing the project information, click OK to return to the Publish window.

Step 3: Adjust the Player Properties and Quality Settings

Use the Properties section of the Publish window to make last-minute changes to your course player and quality settings.

1. The Player property shows the name of the player currently assigned to your project. (The player is the interface learners see around the perimeter of your course.) To make adjustments to your player, click the player name to open the player editor.
2. The Quality property lets you control the compression settings for audio clips, videos, and pictures. The quality settings default to whatever you used the last time you published a course. To change them, click the Quality property, make your adjustments, and click OK.
   • Choose Standard if you want to use the default settings: optimal video quality of 5, audio bitrate of 56 kbps, and JPG image quality of 100%.
   • Choose Custom if you want to define your own quality settings. Drag the slider for any of the three values to change the compression. Higher values give you higher-quality output but also larger file sizes (which means longer download times). Lower values give you smaller file sizes and faster download times, but the visual and audio quality will be lower as well.
     
     Tip: The image compression setting only affects JPG files.
   • Mark the Optimize Audio Volume box to normalize audio throughout your course for consistent volume across all slides.
     
     Tip: If your course audio already has consistent volume, you can speed up the publishing process by unchecking this option.

Step 4: Choose to Publish a Slide, a Scene, or the Entire Course

By default, Storyline will publish your entire course. However, you can now choose to publish a specific scene from your course or even just a single slide. This is helpful when you want to publish multiple courses from the same project file.

Just click the Publish property, then choose the entire project, a single scene, or a single slide.

Step 5: Publish

When you're finished making selections, click the Publish button. When the publishing process is complete, you’ll see the Publish Successful window with several follow-up options.

View Project	This launches the published course in your default web browser. Important: Since your files have been prepared for web delivery, you might encounter unexpected behavior when viewing the course on your local hard drive. It’s best to upload your published output to a web server for proper testing.
Email	This opens a new email message with a zipped file of your published course attached. This option is helpful if you need to send your course to a web server administrator for deployment. We don’t recommend emailing a published course to learners. Security restrictions on their computers will prevent some features in your course from working properly. Upload the course to a server instead, then give learners a link to the story.html file.
FTP	This opens a window where you can enter your FTP credentials and transfer your output to a web server.
Zip	This creates a zipped version of your course files in the same location where your course was published.
Open	This opens a file viewer where you can see the files Storyline just created. After you move the files to a web server, send learners a link to the story.html file, which is the file that launches your course.

Step 6: Distribute Your Published Course

Now that you've published your course, it's time to upload it to a server and give it a test run. Then send learners a link to the story.html file.