🎓 Lesson 24: Capstone III — Publish, Test on an LMS & Course Wrap-Up

📦 Choose Your Publish Format

You authored in Captivate; now you publish so learners can take the course somewhere else. Publishing packages your project into a format that runs in a browser and, when needed, talks to a Learning Management System. This is Lesson 15 applied for real to your own course. The format you choose depends on where the course is going:

Figure 1 — The common publish formats and when each fits. Your LMS's documentation says which it prefers.

For the capstone, publish both SCORM and HTML5. SCORM gives you the real, trackable LMS-ready package; HTML5 gives you a version you can drop on the web or into a portfolio without needing an LMS at all. Whichever you choose, remember the honest part: your learners never need a Captivate subscription — they just open a link or their LMS. The subscription is for authors like you.

🚀 Publish & Test the Package

In Captivate, open Publish and set the essentials: a clear course title, the output format (SCORM or HTML5), and your responsive/output options. For a SCORM package, you'll pick the SCORM version and confirm the tracking settings — the pass score and completion rules you set up while building the assessment in Lesson 23. Captivate then produces a package: a folder or a .zip, depending on the format.

Here's the whole path from your project to a tracked result — the shape to keep in your head:

Figure 2 — The publish-to-tracking journey: build, publish, test, upload, learner takes it, results report back. Testing is the step people skip and regret.

⬆️ Upload to an LMS & Verify Tracking

With a tested SCORM .zip in hand, uploading is usually straightforward: in your LMS, find the option to add a course or module from a SCORM package, upload the zip, and let the LMS unpack it. LMSs differ, so the exact menu varies — but the concept is the same everywhere: you're handing the LMS a standard package it knows how to run and track.

Then verify tracking, because publishing is only half the promise — the other half is that the LMS actually records what happened. Take the course as a test learner and check that:

• The course launches and plays cleanly inside the LMS frame.
• It records completion when you finish.
• It records the score and the pass/fail result correctly.
• A retake behaves the way you intended (fresh attempt, or resume).

No LMS handy? That's fine — this is exactly why you published HTML5 too. Host the HTML5 output on the web (any static web host works) and you have a real, shareable course link. You won't get LMS tracking that way, but you'll have a live course you can put in a portfolio and send to anyone — which for a capstone is a genuine win.

💡 SCORM testing without an LMS. A generic SCORM testing service (the SCORM Cloud style of tool) lets you upload your package and see the tracking data it would report — completion, score, pass/fail — without owning an LMS. It's the standard way authors sanity-check a SCORM build, and it's how you can complete this step even if no LMS is available to you today.

✅ Final Check & Share

Before you call it shipped, one last pass — the published output, not the project file, is what learners actually experience, so give it the final look.

• Device check: open the published course on a phone and a desktop. Confirm the responsive layout holds up where it counts (Lesson 7).
• Accessibility check: tab through a couple of slides with the keyboard, confirm alt text and captions survived publishing, and check contrast on real screens (Lesson 14).
• Share for review: send the link to a friend or colleague and ask them to take it. Fresh eyes catch the typo you've read past twenty times and the interaction that's obvious to you but not to them (Lesson 21).

🎯 Try It: Ship Your Capstone

🎓 Course Wrap-Up — Look How Far You've Come

Twenty-four lessons ago, "Adobe Captivate" might have been just a name in a job listing. Look at everything you can do now:

Figure 3 — The whole journey, in one picture: from foundations to a published capstone course.

You learned the honest shape of Captivate — two products, one subscription, the all-new Adobe Captivate All-New as your modern default and Captivate Classic for its deep specialties. You built responsive courses out of components, mastered Captivate's signature screen recording and software simulation, wrote real assessments, made your work accessible, and published to an LMS. You surveyed Classic so an inherited project will never leave you stranded, looked at AI with clear eyes about what it does and what it costs Add-on / Metered, and ran a professional review-and-handoff workflow. And it all works the same on Windows and Mac Win + Mac.

🌱 Where to Go Next

The best way to keep these skills is to keep building. A few honest directions:

• Build another course — a different topic, ideally one that uses a feature you didn't in the capstone (a software simulation if you skipped it, or a branching interaction). Repetition is how this becomes second nature.
• Go deeper where you're curious — richer interactions, Classic's variables and conditional actions for branching and personalization, or interactive video. You now have the map; explore the corners that interest you.
• Join the community — the Adobe eLearning Community is full of authors sharing work, tips, and feedback. Learning alongside others keeps you moving.
• Learn Captivate's sibling — the other giant in this field is Articulate. Knowing both makes you far more employable, and the instructional-design thinking transfers directly. Ray's Articulate 360 course is a natural next step — build e-learning with Rise and Storyline.
• Explore more free courses — Ray's House of Fun has the full library, all free, all in this same friendly style.

📓 Learning Journal

📝 Lesson Summary

🎉 What You've Accomplished

You started this course unsure what Captivate even was. You're finishing it having planned, built, and published a complete, responsive, interactive, accessible course — tested and shared. Along the way you learned both Captivates, Captivate's signature simulations, real assessment, accessibility, publishing, a professional workflow, and an honest view of AI. That's not "I watched some tutorials." That's authorship. Be proud of it.

❓ Common Questions at This Stage

🔭 Where to Go Next

There's no Lesson 25 — you've reached the end of the path, and you've built a real course to show for it. To keep growing: build another course, go deeper into the features that intrigue you, and join the Adobe eLearning Community. When you're ready to learn Captivate's closest sibling, Ray's Articulate 360 course is the natural companion. And the whole free library lives at Ray's House of Fun. Thank you for spending this journey here — now go build something that teaches someone.

✅ Before You Go

• Save the link to your published capstone somewhere safe — it's a portfolio piece
• Write your final journal reflection and compare it to your Lesson 1 entry
• Pick your next small course topic while the momentum is fresh

📚 Additional Resources

• Course Glossary — SCORM, xAPI, HTML5, LMS, and every other term in plain language
• Quick-Reference Cheat Sheet — the publish-format map and the full workflow, one page
• Captivate Help & Support — the official publishing docs for the current version