The Rapid Elearning Blog

share your e-learning courses header

This is a tip I stumbled upon this week and thought I’d share it because one of the most frequent questions I get from people trying to manage a work portfolio is how to easily share e-learning courses.

Let’s quickly review some of the options that we’ve mentioned in the past:

Today, we’ll look at another option. It’s not free, but it’s inexpensive and comes with other benefits.

Share Your E-Learning Courses with pCloud

I won’t bore you with all the details and benefits regarding pCloud because you can learn that on your own. To keep it simple, it’s a cloud-based storage service similar to Google Drive and Dropbox. What I like that’s different is that it works like a virtual drive so I don’t need to have all of the files on my computers like I do with Dropbox.

Examples of E-Learning Courses 

Anyway, I was testing out their public folder and loaded a few published Storyline courses to see if they work and guess what, they do. Here are three demos:

As you can see, the courses play fine. Thus making it a simple solution for those who want to easily share their courses.

Steps to Share Your E-Learning Courses

Here are a few general steps to share your courses using pCloud.

share your e-learning courses public folder

  • Create a folder inside of your Public Folder to share courses.
  • Copy your published course to that folder. pCloud looks like a drive on your computer so you just need to move the files to the pCloud drive.
  • The files are uploaded to pCloud.
  • Go to your my.pCloud.com site and access the folder where you saved your published course.

share your e-learning courses link

  • Locate the story.html and click on Share>Get Link. That creates a link to the HTML file which loads the course. You don’t want to share the HTML file itself because the user will only be able to see the HTML file and not see the course load and play.
  • Here’s a quick video tutorial that walks through the steps.

I did notice that when accessing the files from the mobile app, you can only share the file and not a link, so it looks like you can only use the share link from the desktop app.

I find pCloud to be a good solution for my online storage needs, especially since I don’t need to have all of the files on my computers like I do if I want to access them in Dropbox. I also like the upload folder option for people who want to share their files at workshops.

If you’ve tried pCloud to share your courses, I’d love to hear about your experience. Share your thoughts in the comments.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.

Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs

Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills

Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.

Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.

Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.



10 responses to “Here’s an Easy Way to Share Your E-Learning Courses”

Tom,

Thanks for updating and sharing this information. I am using Amazon S3 and it works very well. It is still good to know other options just in case. I also like that you let us know what no longer works.

Good to know about the free text-to-speech as well. I will have to try it.

Jeffrey Riley

September 26th, 2017

Any downsides to using Amazon S3? I’m just about to post some modules and this topic was top of mind. Thanks for the timely post.

September 26th, 2017

@Heather: I haven’t run into any issues with S3 and we use it quite a bit here. The links can be a bit funky and long. You could run through bit.ly and create custom links. I use Cloudberry Explorer and they have a link shortener. I believe you can run your own domain through the folder so you don’t get the long links and they look like they come from your site and not Amazon.

Thanks for sharing the S3 information. Do you know how much it costs after the 12mo trial?

Also the PCloud service sounds really good. I’ve never heard of it until I read your article.

Is the required functionality of Cloudberry still free? I tried this a while back. I followed the YouTube instructions step by step, but when it came time to create a new bucket (or something like that), the button was grayed out, and I think I was prompted to upgrade to Pro for $39. I wouldn’t really mind so much, but I wanted to try before I buy and that wasn’t possible.

September 27th, 2017

@Jay: I believe you get the initial GBs for free and charged after that. Even if you had to pay, my guess is that you’d only pay a few cents/month.

September 27th, 2017

@Amy: I’ve been using the free version for a while. From what I can tell you can create buckets, but it does look like they put some limitations on the free version. I guess they need to feed their families, too. There are other ways to manage Amazon S3 content. There are some browser plugins and you can even manage via the S3 console. Here’s an image.

September 29th, 2017

Personally, I use Github Pages. It has a free tier with almost unlimited storage and bandwith, forever. The main drawback is that a bit of Git profficiency is required. Nevertheless, You could use Gitub Desktop, which is a GUI app that forgoes the use of old fashioned terminal commands. Some basic undestanding of Git concepts may be needed though, such as initializing a repository, adding files to repo, selecting branches, commiting files to repo and pushing changes to a remote serer. Then, converting a repository in to a Static Web Page in Github is a snap

October 2nd, 2017

@Cruz: agreed Github Pages works well. I actually had a blog post planned on how to use it, but felt it was probably a little more than most blog readers were interested in doing.

I second Cruz’s recommendation of GitHub pages. The added bonus is since it is a repository, you can use it for easy version control tracking too.

The GitHub Desktop tool makes managing the repository pretty easy once you get the hang of it and there are a number of pre-built templates you can use to have a good looking and responsive site.

Here is the link to ours – https://marquetterml.github.io/information-literacy-modules/