🎓 Lesson 15: Publishing & the LMS

Author Here, Publish Out

Way back in Lesson 1 we drew a line that finally pays off here: Captivate is where you author; it is not where learners take the course. Your saved project file — the .cpt from the all-new Adobe Captivate (or .cptx from Classic) — is the editable source, like a chef's recipe. Learners never touch it. Instead you publish, which cooks that source into a finished dish learners can consume: a set of web files, or a packaged course an LMS can install.

This distinction matters for a reassuring reason we've repeated all course long: learners never need a Captivate subscription. Trial / Paid They open a link or click a course in their LMS and it just runs in a browser. Only you, the author, need Captivate. Publishing is the bridge between your paid authoring tool and your subscription-free audience.

The all-new Adobe Captivate publishes modern HTML5 output — content that runs in any current web browser on any device, no plug-ins. That's a big deal historically: older e-learning relied on Flash, which is long dead. Everything you publish today is HTML5 at its core; SCORM and xAPI simply wrap that HTML5 with a standard way to talk to a Learning Management System. Understand that and the formats stop being a mystery.

The Formats: HTML5, SCORM & xAPI

When you publish, Captivate asks what kind of output you want. Here's the whole map at a glance, then the plain-English version of each.

Figure 1 — From one project, several publish targets: plain HTML5 for the web, or an LMS-aware package (SCORM/xAPI) that reports results back.

HTML5 — the web output

HTML5 is the raw web version of your course: a folder of files (an index.html plus supporting assets) that plays in any browser. Use it when you want to host the course on a website or share a link and you don't need to record scores centrally. It's the simplest path — no LMS required. The catch: on its own, plain HTML5 has nowhere to send completion or score data. If you just need people to take a course and don't need a report of who passed, HTML5 is perfect. If you need that report, you want SCORM or xAPI.

SCORM — the LMS standard

SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) is the long-standing standard that lets a course and a Learning Management System talk to each other. Publish as SCORM and Captivate produces a ZIP package you upload to the LMS; the LMS then launches your HTML5 content and, through SCORM, receives things like completion status, score, and pass/fail. It's how nearly every corporate and academic LMS has worked for years — if someone says "we need it for our LMS," they usually mean SCORM.

SCORM comes in two versions you'll see in the publish dialog:

• SCORM 1.2 — older, simplest, extremely widely supported. A safe default when you're unsure; almost every LMS accepts it.
• SCORM 2004 — newer, with finer control over sequencing and status (it distinguishes completion from success, for example). Use it when your LMS or client specifically asks for it.

The honest rule: ask your LMS administrator which version and settings they want. LMSs vary, and matching their expectation saves hours of debugging. When you have no guidance, SCORM 1.2 is the most broadly compatible starting point.

xAPI — richer, modern tracking

xAPI (Experience API, also called Tin Can) is the newer standard. Where SCORM mostly tracks a single course session inside an LMS, xAPI can record granular statements — "learner answered question 3," "learner watched the safety video" — and send them to a Learning Record Store (LRS), which may live inside or alongside an LMS. Use xAPI when you need detailed learning analytics or tracking beyond a single course launch. It's more powerful and more flexible; it's also a bit more to set up, so reach for it when the extra data is worth it.

💡 You'll also see AICC and cmi5. AICC is an older LMS standard you may meet in legacy systems — think of it as a predecessor to SCORM. cmi5 is a modern profile that pairs xAPI's rich tracking with LMS launch/management, aiming to be "the best of both." You rarely need these as a beginner; recognize the names and pick SCORM or xAPI unless a client specifies otherwise.

Tracking: How the LMS Knows

Here's the part that feels like magic until you see it: how does an LMS know a learner passed? The chain is simple. You built quizzes and a results/score slide back in Lessons 12–13 and set a pass threshold. When you publish as SCORM or xAPI, Captivate wires that scoring into the standard's reporting. At runtime, the learner takes the course inside the LMS; your course reports its status through SCORM/xAPI; the LMS stores it and shows it to administrators.

The pieces you control at publish time typically include:

• What "complete" means — reaching the end (slide viewed), or achieving a passing score, or both. This is the setting people most often get wrong; decide deliberately.
• The pass/fail score — usually inherited from your quiz's pass threshold. Confirm it's what you intend.
• What data reports — completion status, score, pass/fail, and (with xAPI) detailed interaction data. More detail means more you can analyze, but also more to configure and test.
• Retakes / attempts — whether and how a learner can retry, and how the LMS records multiple attempts.

A quick reassurance about privacy and cost: none of this reporting requires your learners to buy anything, and the tracking data flows to your LMS, controlled by your organization. Some hosted review or analytics services Adobe offers may be billed separately or metered Add-on / Metered — as always, we won't quote numbers; check adobe.com/products/captivate for what's included in your plan today.

Publish, Test & Review

Let's walk the actual publish flow. Adobe adjusts the exact dialog between releases, so we'll describe it by what you're choosing, not by pixel positions.

Figure 2 — All-new Captivate (a simplified mock-up, not a real screenshot): a Publish dialog with title, output format, and responsive HTML5 with score/completion reporting on.

The choices you'll make:

• Project title & output name — what the course and its files are called. Keep it clear and versioned (more on that in a moment).
• Output format — HTML5 for the web, or SCORM 1.2 / SCORM 2004 / xAPI for an LMS (from the map above).
• Responsive / device output — confirm it publishes the responsive HTML5 you built in Lesson 7 so it adapts on phones and tablets.
• Reporting settings — for SCORM/xAPI, set completion criteria, pass score, and what reports (from the tracking section).
• Where it saves — Captivate writes a folder (for HTML5) or a ZIP package (for SCORM) to a location you choose. Note it — that's what you hand over.

Test before you hand it over

Never ship a package you haven't run. Two levels of testing:

1. Run the HTML5 output locally / in a browser. Open the published output and click all the way through: media plays, interactions work, the quiz scores, it's responsive, and (from Lesson 14) it's accessible. Do this for every publish.
2. Test the SCORM/xAPI package in a test harness. You don't need to bother your real LMS to check that tracking works. A SCORM test service (the widely used one is SCORM Cloud, and similar free/trial testers exist — described generically here) lets you upload your package, take the course, and see exactly what completion and score it reported. If it tracks correctly there, it'll almost certainly track in your LMS. This is the single best habit for avoiding the "shows incomplete" bug.

💡 Uploading to a real LMS. Every LMS differs, but the shape is the same: find "add/upload content" (or "add a SCORM package"), upload the ZIP Captivate produced (don't unzip it), set the activity's completion and scoring options to match what you published, then take the course yourself as a test learner and confirm your result appears in the reports. Ask your LMS admin for their specific steps — they've done it a hundred times.

A lightweight review workflow

Publishing isn't only a technical act — it's usually the end of a review cycle. Feedback is far cheaper before launch than after, so build in a review pass:

• Share for feedback early. Publish an HTML5 preview (or use Captivate's review/share feature, where available Add-on / Metered — some hosted review services may be metered; check your plan) and send it to a subject-matter expert and a real target learner. Watching a genuine learner get stuck teaches you more than any checklist.
• Collect comments in one place and triage them: fix now, fix later, or won't fix (with a reason). Don't let feedback scatter across five email threads.
• Version your source file. Captivate projects are single binary files, so keep dated copies — fire-safety_v1.cpt, fire-safety_v2.cpt — and never overwrite your only good copy. Re-publish from the source after each round. (We go deeper on team workflow in Lesson 21.)

🎯 Try It: Publish Two Ways

📓 Learning Journal

📝 Lesson Summary

🎉 What You've Accomplished

This is the milestone the whole course was building toward: you can take a project from an idea to a published, trackable, accessible course that a real learner can open and a real LMS can report on. You've closed Part 3 — Captivate's signature craft of simulating, assessing, and shipping. Everything from here is about doing it better, faster, and for real: Classic's power features, AI and workflow, and the three-part capstone where you publish a course of your own for keeps.

❓ Common Questions at This Stage

🔭 Looking Ahead

Part 3 is complete — you can build, assess, make accessible, and publish a real course. In Lesson 16, Part 4 begins: an honest, guided tour of Captivate Classic — its timeline-and-slides model and the situations where it's still the right tool. Your all-new skills will transfer conceptually, so it'll feel familiar even though it looks different.

✅ Before the Next Lesson

• Publish your course as HTML5 and SCORM, and test at least the HTML5 output
• Write this lesson's journal prompt — your format choice and one tracking question to verify
• If you can, sign up for a free SCORM test service so you're ready to verify packages at the capstone

📚 Additional Resources

• Course Glossary — SCORM, xAPI, LMS, HTML5, LRS, cmi5 and more in plain language
• Quick-Reference Cheat Sheet — including the publish-format map in one place
• Captivate Help & Support — the official docs; search "publish" and "SCORM" for your current version