I am a newbie here, I apologize in advance! Have some general questions

[kcoldani]

Where do I publish a new course? On my own server?

Do I have to upload to an Adobe server?

Do the users access the course by entering a URL and then sign in?

Does a user have to download an app or software?

Can a user upload an image file that will be viewable on their page?

[RodWard]

Welcome.

How you publish your course will really depend on how you expect your end users to access it.  It would seem that you haven't so far given that side of the project enough thought.

In general most users will access your content via a web browser on their computer or mobile device.  The content can include text, images, audio, video and animation, as long as the formats are viewable in a web browser.  (Alternative non-browser formats are EXE and PDF, but these involve Flash Player technology which is unlikely to be used by many organisations in the near future.

Are your users all persons belonging to your company that have access to a corporate intranet? If so, then you would publish to HTML5 and upload the content to your intranet, then advertise a hyperlink that end users could use to launch the course content.

Does your company have a Learning Management System (which is also usually part of an intranet) and want user interaction with your course content to be tracked for reporting purposes?  If so, then you would publish your content as SCORM modules and upload them to your LMS so that users can access it from there.

Since it appears you are just beginning your journey with Captivate and e-learning, I encourage you to start doing a lot of reading on the internet and try to get the opportunity to take some courses about all of this.

[kcoldani]

Thanks for the reply Rod. I will try to give more info. I may have been too general in my comments.

I currently have an E-learning system developed in WordPress. I am looking to go to another system to deliver the learning content. My reason to do something different is to be able to expand this to other subjects. My current solution is very specific to the industry we made it for and not easy to change. I sell this service to companies that need the training. They pay per student registered into my system.

How you publish your course will really depend on how you expect your end users to access it.  It would seem that you haven't so far given that side of the project enough thought.

My current training allows the users to register into the program which creates a personal webpage for them where they can access their lessons which are either video based, tests, or evaluations. I host the program on GoDaddy private server. They can upload pictures to the system as required by some lessons and are able to see their uploads (reason for last question). Access for them is web based with a login name and password.

Are your users all persons belonging to your company that have access to a corporate intranet? If so, then you would publish to HTML5 and upload the content to your intranet, then advertise a hyperlink that end users could use to launch the course content.

Users are employees of other companies (my clients). Users access from mobile devices from the internet. Not my employees.

Does your company have a Learning Management System (which is also usually part of an intranet) and want user interaction with your course content to be tracked for reporting purposes?  If so, then you would publish your content as SCORM modules and upload them to your LMS so that users can access it from there.

I do want to have reporting and tracking capabilities. I do that now, but it is all database functions in my own program. Maybe what I am learning here is that an LMS is separate from the software that is delivering the content?

Since it appears you are just beginning your journey with Captivate and e-learning, I encourage you to start doing a lot of reading on the internet and try to get the opportunity to take some courses about all of this.

I am researching heavily. Most of the companies I have discussed this with so far (through Capterra) offer a complete solution. Problem is that the complete solutions do not always have all the features I want or need. I just found out about Captive but it is very hard to get specific information on the website or in the blogs (which is why I am posting).

So, do I understand this correctly...Captivate is a software to design your content and you need a separate LMS to gather the information from tests and such to view statistics?

Re: I am a newbie here, I apologize in advance! Have some general questions

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

Yes that is correct.  Captivate is the authoring tool.  But to make things a little confusing, Adobe has just recently released its own LMS called Captivate Prime.  However, the two products are not the same.

So you can use Captivate to create your SCORM-compliant courses for upload to an LMS, and you could use Captivate Prime as the LMS, or you could use one of the other 600 or so LMS apps that exist in the market.