🎓 Lesson 24: Capstone II — Publish, Test, Share & Where to Go Next
You built a real course. Now you'll ship it like a professional: a pre-flight pass to catch problems, publishing to the right target, testing that it actually works (including tracking), and gathering feedback. Then we'll close the loop on the whole course — celebrate what you've accomplished across all four parts, and map out exactly where to go next. This is the finish line, and you've earned it.
📚 What You'll Learn
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:
- Run a pre-flight pass: accessibility, mobile preview, and testing every trigger
- Choose the right publish target (LMS/SCORM, Web, Review 360, or Reach 360) and produce the output
- Test a published course and confirm completion and tracking actually work
- Gather and act on feedback through a review loop — and know your next steps as an e-learning author
⏱️ Estimated Time: 60–90 minutes to ship + wrap-up reading
🎯 Project: Publish, test, and share your capstone for real — then celebrate. Trial / Paid
In This Lesson
🚦 Pre-flight: Test Before You Ship
Pilots run a pre-flight checklist before every flight, no matter how experienced. Do the same before you publish — it takes ten minutes and catches the embarrassing stuff before learners (or a hiring manager) ever see it.
Here's the whole ship pipeline you'll follow this lesson:
a11y, mobile, triggers"] --> B["🚀 Publish
pick a target"] B --> C["🧪 Test
confirm it works & tracks"] C --> D["💬 Share
gather feedback"] D --> E["🔁 Iterate
fix & republish"] style A fill:#fde68a,color:#1e293b style B fill:#fed7aa,color:#1e293b style C fill:#bfdbfe,color:#1e293b style D fill:#c7d2fe,color:#1e293b style E fill:#bbf7d0,color:#1e293b
Figure 1 — The ship pipeline: pre-flight, publish, test, share, iterate.
🧠 Mindset
"Publish" can feel scary — like it has to be perfect. It doesn't. Publishing is not a final exam; it's a save point. Every course you've ever taken was republished many times as its author found and fixed things. Ship it, test it, improve it. The willingness to put your work in front of others and iterate is exactly what separates people who talk about building courses from people who actually ship them.
Run these three quick passes before you publish:
- Accessibility pass. Walk the Lesson 19 checklist: every image has meaningful alt text (or is marked decorative), focus order makes sense on interactive slides, contrast is readable, nothing relies on color alone, and captions exist for any audio or video. Rise is responsive and accessible by default, but you still own the alt text and captions.
- Mobile preview (Rise). Preview your Rise course at tablet and phone widths. Read it top to bottom on the small size — that's how a lot of learners will actually take it.
- Trigger test (Storyline). Preview the whole slide/scene and click every interactive object. Confirm your gate unlocks only when it should, states change as expected, and no trigger fires at the wrong time. Triggers run top-down — if something misbehaves, check the order.
🚀 Publish: Choose Your Target
"Publishing" turns your author file into learner-ready HTML5 output. The big question is where it's going, because that decides the format. You met all of these in Lesson 20 — here's the quick decision for your capstone.
| Where it's going | Publish target | Pick this when… |
|---|---|---|
| A Learning Management System | LMS — SCORM 1.2 (safe default), SCORM 2004, xAPI, AICC, or cmi5 | Your organization tracks completion and scores in an LMS. SCORM 1.2 is the reliable default; xAPI/cmi5 give richer data. |
| A website or a link | Web / HTML5 | You just want a shareable course with no tracking — great for a portfolio you host yourself. |
| Reviewers who need to comment | Review 360 | You want feedback before it's final — reviewers comment right on the slide. |
| Learners, without a separate LMS | Reach 360 Add-on | You need to deliver and track but don't have an LMS. Seat-based; often billed separately. |
💡 For a portfolio-first capstone
If your goal is a piece you can show for ID/L&D jobs, the easiest path is: publish the Rise course to Review 360 (instant shareable link, looks polished, no LMS needed) and/or publish to Web and host the folder. If you're practicing the LMS workflow, publish SCORM 1.2 and test it on a SCORM test environment (next section). You don't have to pick just one — publish more than once.
⚠️ Set completion before you publish
In the publish dialog, tell the course how a learner counts as "complete" — usually by reaching a passing score on your graded quiz, or by viewing all slides/lessons. If you skip this, an LMS may never mark anyone complete and you'll think tracking is "broken." We won't quote exact menu positions because Articulate updates the dialog, but the option lives in the publish/tracking settings. Trial / Paid
🧪 Test It for Real
Publishing produces a file or a link — but "it published" is not "it works." Always test the published output the way a learner will experience it, not just the preview inside the editor.
- Web / Review 360: open the link in a normal browser (and on your phone). Click through the whole thing. Do interactions work? Does the quiz score? Does it look right on mobile?
- SCORM / LMS: if you have an LMS, upload the published zip and take the course as a test learner. If you don't, a common approach is a SCORM test service such as SCORM Cloud — many people use it to sanity-check tracking before touching a real LMS. Availability and any free allowance vary, so check its current terms.
- Confirm completion & score. Finish the course as a test learner, pass (and fail) the quiz on purpose, and check that the LMS or test tool records completion and the score you expect. This is the single most common thing to get wrong — and the most satisfying to see work.
💡 Test the sad paths too. Don't only click the "correct" way through. Fail the quiz, skip around, resize the window, refresh mid-course. Real learners do all of this. Finding a rough edge now is a win, not a failure.
💬 Share & Gather Feedback
A course gets better when other people try it. Review 360 (Lesson 21) is built for exactly this: publish to Review 360, send the private link to a colleague or friend, and they leave comments right on the slide or block — no spreadsheet, no "which screen did you mean?" You read the comments, make changes, republish, and mark them resolved.
Figure 2 — The review loop: publish, share, collect on-slide comments, revise, republish, resolve.
✅ Good feedback to ask for
Don't just ask "what do you think?" — you'll get "looks good." Ask targeted questions: Was anything confusing? Did every interaction work on your device? Was the quiz fair? Did it feel too long or too short? Specific questions get specific, useful answers.
🎯 Try It: Ship Your Capstone
🏋️ Activity: Publish, test, and share for real
Objective: Take the course you built in Lesson 23 all the way to a published, tested, shared piece of work.
Steps
- Pre-flight. Run the accessibility pass (alt text, focus order, captions, contrast), preview the Rise course on mobile, and test every Storyline trigger. Fix what you find. (⏱️ 15 min)
- Set completion. In the publish settings, set how the course marks complete (passing quiz score, or all slides viewed). (⏱️ 5 min)
- Publish. Choose your target — Review 360 and/or Web for a portfolio, or SCORM for LMS practice — and produce the output (link or zip). (⏱️ 10 min)
- Test the published output the way a learner would: open the link (or upload the zip / use a SCORM test service), click through, pass and fail the quiz, and confirm completion and score are recorded. (⏱️ 15 min)
- Share for feedback. Send the Review 360 (or Web) link to at least one person with two or three targeted questions. Note their comments. (⏱️ 10 min)
- Iterate once. Make at least one improvement based on your testing or their feedback, then republish. (⏱️ 10 min)
💡 Hint — no LMS to test with?
That's normal for most learners. Publish to Web or Review 360 and test the link directly — that fully validates your interactions and quiz behavior. If you specifically want to see SCORM tracking, upload your SCORM zip to a SCORM test service such as SCORM Cloud (check its current terms/availability). Either way, you've demonstrated a real publish- and-test workflow.
✅ Project Completion Checklist — You've Shipped a Course!
- You ran a pre-flight pass (accessibility + mobile + triggers) and fixed what you found
- You set a completion rule in the publish settings
- You published to at least one target and have a working link or zip
- You tested the published output as a learner and confirmed completion/score
- You shared it and collected at least a little real feedback
- You made at least one improvement and republished
- 🎉 You have a finished, published, tested course you can add to a portfolio
🎯 Quick Quiz
Question 1: Your SCORM course uploads to the LMS fine, but no one is ever marked "complete." What's the most likely cause?
Question 2: You want stakeholders to comment directly on your slides before the course is final. Which target fits best?
🎓 Course Wrap-Up: What You've Accomplished
Stop for a second and look back at where you started. In Lesson 1 you maybe weren't sure what "Articulate" even meant. Now you've planned, built, published, and tested a real interactive course. That's an enormous distance to travel — take the credit.
🏆 The Four Parts You Conquered
Part 1 — Foundations. You learned what the suite is, the honest subscription story, how to get set up (including Storyline on a Mac), how to choose between Rise and Storyline, and how to think like a course designer before building.
Part 2 — Build Fast with Rise 360. You built responsive courses from blocks — content, interactions like Labeled Graphics and Tabs, scenarios, knowledge checks, and graded quizzes — all in the browser, cross-platform.
Part 3 — Go Deep with Storyline 360. You learned the interface and timeline, then the three pillars — states, triggers, and variables — and combined them with layers, buttons, hotspots, media, and characters into custom interactions.
Part 4 — Assess, Publish & Ship. You built solid assessments, made accessibility a first-class concern, published to LMS/Web/Review/Reach with SCORM and xAPI, ran review and collaboration workflows, used the AI Assistant honestly — and shipped a capstone.
🎉 You Are an E-Learning Author
Not "learning to be." You are one. You can take a topic and turn it into a published, trackable, accessible interactive course — the exact skill on all those job listings we mentioned in Lesson 1. Everything from here is refinement and range, and you already have the foundation to add any of it.
🔭 Where to Go Next
You've got a complete, working skill set. Here's how to keep growing — pick whatever excites you; there's no required order.
🦸 Join the community
- E-Learning Heroes — Articulate's community, and one of the best in the industry. Free to browse and join: tutorials, downloads, and thousands of examples you can learn from.
- Weekly challenges. E-Learning Heroes runs recurring build challenges on a theme. They're a fantastic, low-stakes way to practice, build portfolio pieces, and see how others solve the same brief. Do a few — they level you up fast.
🚀 Advanced topics to explore
- Sliders & dials — interactive objects that let learners drag a value; pair them with variables and conditions for "what-if" interactions and simulations.
- Drag-and-drop freeform — build sorting, matching, and labeling interactions where learners drag objects onto targets; a natural next step after states and triggers.
- JavaScript triggers — Storyline lets you run JavaScript as a trigger action. It's an advanced door: send data out, do calculations, integrate with a page. You don't need it for most work, but it's there when you outgrow the built-ins.
- xAPI deep-dive — go beyond pass/complete: xAPI (and cmi5) can record granular "statements" about what learners do, opening up richer analytics and a Learning Record Store.
- Accessibility, deeper — grow from "checklist compliant" to genuinely inclusive: screen-reader testing, accessible custom interactions, and WCAG at a finer grain.
💼 Build a portfolio (for ID / L&D jobs)
Your capstone is portfolio piece #1. To turn skills into opportunities, collect 3–5 varied pieces — a polished Rise course, a custom Storyline interaction, a branching scenario, an accessibility showcase — and host them (Review 360 links, a personal site, or a portfolio platform). "Articulate" and "Storyline" are everywhere in instructional-design and L&D listings; a portfolio that shows the work beats a résumé that only claims it.
📚 Keep learning with Ray
This is one of a whole library of free, honest, project-driven courses. If you enjoyed this one, you'll feel right at home in the others:
- Ray's House of Fun — the full catalog, including courses on OneNote, Obsidian, Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive), Microsoft 365 (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneDrive), and Discord — all free and built in the same warm, honest style.
- Say hello — questions, feedback, or just to share what you built. I'd genuinely love to see your capstone.
📓 Learning Journal
One last entry — and this one's special. Your journal has tracked your whole climb; this is the view from the top. Jot down:
- Key concepts from the whole course that stuck with you
- Things that clicked that once felt impossible
- Questions you still want to chase (great fodder for your next steps)
- Ideas you want to build now that you can
- Your progress and how you feel — then vs. now
✍️ This lesson's prompt: Go back and re-read your Lesson 1 journal entry — your "why" and the topic you hoped to build. Did you build it? How does it feel to look back now? Write a few honest sentences to your Lesson-1 self, then name one thing you'll build next.
📝 Lesson Summary
🎓 Key Takeaways
- Run a pre-flight pass — accessibility, mobile preview, and testing every trigger — before you publish.
- Choose the publish target by destination: LMS/SCORM (SCORM 1.2 is the safe default), Web, Review 360 for feedback, or Reach 360 to deliver.
- Always test the published output as a learner, and set a completion rule or the LMS may never mark anyone complete.
- Share via Review 360's on-slide comments, iterate, and republish — publishing is a save point, not a final exam.
🎉 What You've Accomplished
You finished the course — and more importantly, you finished a course of your own. You planned it, built it in Rise and Storyline, made it accessible, published it, tested that it works, and shared it for feedback. You crossed all four parts, from "what is Articulate?" to shipping a trackable interactive course. You're an e-learning author now, with a portfolio piece to prove it.
❓ Common Questions at This Stage
Which publish format should I use for my portfolio?
Review 360 and/or Web are the easiest: both give a link you can share instantly, no LMS required. Use SCORM only when you're delivering to an actual LMS or specifically practicing that workflow. You can publish the same course multiple ways.
I don't have an LMS — did I really "publish" a course?
Yes. A Web or Review 360 link is a fully published course. An LMS only adds tracking/reporting on top. If you want to see tracking in action without a corporate LMS, a SCORM test service like SCORM Cloud is the usual way (check its current terms).
My trial is ending. Now what?
Your published courses keep working — learners never need a subscription, so anything you published
stays live. To keep authoring, you'd move to a paid plan (check articulate.com/pricing
for current options). Many people plan a focused build sprint inside the trial, publish their portfolio
pieces, and subscribe later when a job or project calls for it.
🔭 Looking Ahead
Your next chapter is out in the wild: do a few E-Learning Heroes challenges, grow your portfolio, and pick one advanced topic — sliders/dials, drag-and-drop freeform, JavaScript triggers, or xAPI — to explore next. Keep the Glossary and Cheat Sheet handy as you build.
✅ Before You Go
- Save your published links somewhere you'll find them — that's your first portfolio piece
- Write your final journal entry (re-read your Lesson 1 entry first)
- Join E-Learning Heroes and browse a weekly challenge
- Explore Ray's other free courses at Ray's House of Fun
📚 Additional Resources
- Course Glossary — every term in plain language
- Quick-Reference Cheat Sheet — trigger recipes, publish formats, and the subscription map
- E-Learning Heroes — community, tutorials, downloads, and challenges
- Articulate Support — official help & documentation
🌟 Encouragement for the Journey
You started as someone who wasn't sure what Articulate even was. You're finishing as someone who has planned, built, published, and shipped a real interactive course. That transformation is entirely yours — I just pointed the way. Now go build the courses only you can build. I can't wait to see them. 🎉