I recently had the opportunity to coach a colleague on the technical aspects of creating a sample eLearning course for a perspective employer. One of the challenges with eLearning is providing a work sample when you don’t personally have your own LMS. I came up with some suggestions that could help my colleague and I decided that I would share them with you as well.
One option that I frequently use is my Dropbox account. When I signed up for my Dropbox account it included a special folder called a public folder. This folder was open to the whole World Wide Web and anything I put in this folder was available for anyone to view. Essentially this is my own little web server. Unfortunately this type of free account is no longer available but you can sign up for a Dropbox Pro account for about $10 per month if you want the same functionality. It’s far less expensive than maintaining your own personal LMS. Below is a video where I instruct users with such an account on how to setup their eLearning work sample for access on the web.
Another way you can share your eLearning work sample is by publishing it as a standalone application. When you publish an eLearning course it normally packages a whole bunch of files into a ZIP package commonly known as a SCORM file. You can unpack these and sort of get your eLearning to work. You could also publish to a folder and then provide instructions to the end user on how to launch the course but this is messy and not always simple for the end user. Adobe Captivate maintains the ability to publish to either a Windows EXE file or an Apple App file. This allows you to publish a course as a standalone application that anyone with a Windows Machine or a Mac could then run. You can then simply copy the one file to a thumb drive and share with the person asking for the work submission. Incidentally you do not need a Mac to publish the Mac version or a Windows PC to publish the Windows version. Captivate can do both formats on either platform. Here is a video that explains how to do this for the Windows situation:
This next one is not my favourite solution but if either of the first two options are not open to you, you could publish to a PDF. There are some specific requirements that would be difficult to confirm before submitting a work sample this way, specifically this does require a certain version or higher of Adobe Reader. Of course there is no guarantee that the person you are giving the work submission to is using the correct version. In fact they may be using any number of third party PDF readers that won’t work with this solution. If you would like to try this out here is my video on that process:
As a final thought, if none of these solutions are a viable option for you, consider signing up for a trial account of Adobe Captivate Prime. Captivate Prime is Adobe’s cloud-based LMS solution. It’s fairly intuitive and in a pinch could be used as a temporary LMS for these purposes.
I hope that one of these solutions works for you and of course good luck in getting that new position in eLearning design and development: