Program Hosting Question

[amandau51572206]

Hi everyone,

My team has developed an interactive course using Adobe Captivate that works well when previewing in Captivate, however we have been unsuccessful when it comes to hosting the program. Our program contains about 30 minutes of video files so it's pretty large, and we need the ability to access the data people who complete the program enter (e.g., quizzes and typed responses). With that in mind, we we've been attempting to use Captivate Prime to host the program, however we continuously run into errors (e.g., inability to upload projects on our own, interactive buttons not working, videos not playing) that have so far been pretty frustrating and slow to be fixed. We've worked closely with Adobe's customer service team, however they often say the errors don't show on their end and we're coming up on a deadline where we'll need a solution that has yet to come with Prime. With this in mind, does anyone have any suggestions for hosting platforms outside of Captivate Prime? We're now considering Amazon A3 or hosting on our own website, but we're very new to this and a lot of the information online is outdated, so it's been hard to find a solution. Any help or advice is greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

[RodWard]

If you already have a website capable of running PHP and MySQL, have you ever considered just installing a Moodle server instance?

If you don't have thousands of users requiring training, take a look at SCORM Cloud's offering.  You won't find a better LMS.

[shawnlords]

We use Scorm Cloud to test all of our courses and it will also track the users who use them.  It is fairly inexpensive for a small amount of users.  D0cebo and Litmos are also not that expensive and are very reliable and simple to use. Another option is hosting the video on youtube, Vimeo, or Shark Video server to reduce the file size and linking to outside the course compared to having it imbedded in  the course.

[Erik_Lord]

Agreed with Shawn's point on videos. As you've stated, the videos are making the file huge. I'm not sure how well Captivate's 'preload' functions in the HTML version but it certainly seems to not be as effective as it was with SWF.

And not only are video files generally large, but on-demand delivery of them just puts even more the user's download capabilities (bandwidth).

Far better to put your videos on some sort of streaming platform (YouTube, Vimeo... i've not heard of 'Shark') and integrate the videos into the CP project that way.

Downsides of that:

1. You don't have any way to easily determine when the user has viewed the video. in a recent project, we embedded streaming video via the WebObject...and just timed out Next button to not appear for the same duration as the video. Of courses, that's imprecise if the video takes a bit to load, or the user pauses it, etc.

2. You have to put your video on that third-party platform. Keeping video 'private' on YouTube/Vimeo generally keeps it out of the public eye, but you lawyer folks may have concerns with the service terms.

3. Going to a paid service solves that second problem, generally, but then adds to your cost.

BUT if you're going to deliver video-intensive pieces, then delivering them via video streaming is really the best way to do it.

And you may be able to stick with Prime...but if you can't upload videos yourself, that may be a problem still.

Could try a demo account with other providers (i.e. Inquisiq or many other LMS providers) and see if process and delivery is better...but agreed with Rod's suggestions on either self-hosted Moodle or SCORM Cloud too.