Firmwater

Posted April 1, 2010 by Stefan Leyhane

Post a comment

One of our clients was having problems yesterday loading some content to our Learning Management System (LMS) that was created with Adobe Presenter.

Being new to working with a LMS, he’s not well-versed in the technical jargon of the learning industry — he doesn’t speak SCORM. He had a folder of content and wanted to be able to load it and have students view it. Understandable. Our client had received the published files from a colleague so he hadn’t actually used Presenter himself, nor did he know what format the files were in.

I’m not aware of any of our other clients’ use of Adobe Presenter so I didn’t have any hands on experience with it. In the PowerPoint-to-Flash learning category of authoring tools, the majority leans heavily to the use of Articulate Presenter. Articulate has great support and a strong community behind them. They’ve got lots of useful articles about working with their tools, including this one detailing step-by-step instructions for publishing to a LMS. Adobe… not so much.

I went hunting on the Web for instructions to help our client out. The best I could find on how to publish from Presenter to a LMS was a partial screen shot of the product’s ‘Reporting’ tab (on Adobe’s features page).

Since I couldn’t find any instructions, I figured it would be worthwhile to download their product, try it out and document how to do it.

Publishing to a LMS

Note: these instructions are for Adobe Presenter 7.

1. Create your presentation (including quizzes, if needed).

2. Presenter’s LMS publish settings are hidden away under the ‘Quiz’ grouping of the Adobe Presenter ribbon. Click the ‘Manage’ toolbar button.

3. You’ll see a ‘Quiz Manager’ dialog with several tabs. Select the ‘Reporting’ tab.

   

4. Check the ‘Enable reporting for this presentation’ checkbox and select ‘SCORM’ from the list of Learning Management Systems options (other options are ‘Adobe Connect Pro’ and ‘AICC’).

5. Click the ‘Manifest…’ button to specify details for the SCORM package.

   • Choose the SCORM version (the Firmwater LMS supports both versions).
   • Specify the course’s identifier, title, and description.
   • Specify the launchable item’s (SCO) identifier and title.
   • Click ‘OK’.

   

6. Specify your other reporting options.

   • Choose the report data to send to the LMS.
   • Determine what status should be reported to the LMS (complete/incomplete vs. pass/fail).
   • Specify how to report scores (score vs. percent).
   • Indicate the level of detail to report (just the score or score with interactions).
   • Click ‘OK’.

7. Now you’re ready to publish. Click the ‘Publish’ toolbar item on the Adobe Presenter ribbon.

8. You’ll see the ‘Publish Presentation’ dialog.

   • Choose the location to save the published presentation.
   • Check the ‘Zip package’ output option checkbox.
   • Click ‘Publish’.

   

9. A single ZIP file will be generated in the location that you specified. Load this file to your LMS.

Other Notes

Adobe Presenter allows you to change the theme used for the presentation and offers a Theme Editor so that you can customize it to some degree. There is no option, however, for including an ‘Exit’ button within your content. You might need to configure your LMS to display one.

Hope these instructions help — it should be useful for us to use as a reference in the future!