Date limit or password protect course

Jan 22, 2016

Hello,

I'm looking into ways of protecting our courses from being illegally redistributed or accessed after a certain date. The two ways I have thought of so far are either to use the built-in JavaScript functionality to get a password from a server and having the user enter the same password to proceed beyond the first slide, or to disable any access beyond the first slide after a set date.

Is something like this feasible either through current features, or JavaScript inside Storyline 2? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

19 Replies
Christie Pollick

Hi, Markus -- I see that Matthew has provided you with one potential solution involving JavaScript, so I just wanted to note if you should decide to go that route, unfortunately we are not able to provide support for JavaScript coding. In case you wanted to take a look, here is a document on recommended JavaScript Best Practices

John McGrath

Hi Leslie

Thanks for your reply. I would like to achieve this within the Articulate suite rather than a LMS.

I believe the feature is in Adobe Captivate but am trying to find a way of doing this in Articulate.

Surely this is a simple task for your Devopps team and there are plenty of users who will test it for them.  Thank you. 

James Bright

Hi,

I am trying to publish to an LMS with a date expiry option. I have a client who would like to test one of my courses, but I don't want them to have more than a day or two to try it. I see the information above about JavaScript, but was wondering if there was an easier way to set up the expire date when publishing to LMS.

 

Thanks,


Greg

Philippe JEANTY

Hi Matthew

I look at your ExpiryDate.story above. Neat.. but then how to incorporate this ? I suspect this is the first slide.

You would add a trigger like

Show layer "expired" when "courseExpired" changes, if "courseExpired" is equal to True

and have a layer on that slide that says "Expired, please obtain a new version" and a a trigger on the layer that says:

Exit course when the timeline reaches xx second

 

and in case the "courseExpired" is false a trigger on the base layer that says:

Jump to Next slide when "courseExpired" changes, if "courseExpired" is equal to False

Is that about correct ?

Brian Dennis

Place Matthew's javascript code inside an Execute Javscript trigger on the very first slide of your project, as the topmost trigger that starts on timeline start. Once created, you should be fine to follow Matthew's directions regarding the project variable. A note to all - this technique relies on scripting support, which does not exist on all platforms and devices. See Articulate's official KnowledgeBase regarding the availability of javascript

Massimo Scali

I'm sorry to say that this is not a good solution if your goal is to provide the SCORM to the customer and make the course expire after a given time. The problem is that the JavaScript code you write in the Storyline project is perfectly readable and editable by the customers and thus they can change the expiration date whenever they want and extend the lifetime of the course. In other words, this solution is not reliable for you as a content provider.

The only reliable solution would be a core feature in Storyline but it seems they don't care about this because after 6 years (!) they haven't still provided it.

Anjali Panakkat
Massimo Scali

I'm sorry to say that this is not a good solution if your goal is to provide the SCORM to the customer and make the course expire after a given time. The problem is that the JavaScript code you write in the Storyline project is perfectly readable and editable by the customers and thus they can change the expiration date whenever they want and extend the lifetime of the course. In other words, this solution is not reliable for you as a content provider.

The only reliable solution would be a core feature in Storyline but it seems they don't care about this because after 6 years (!) they haven't still provided it.

Hi Massimo! Do you know where this code stays in the published folder? It will be good to know so we can protect that file too before sharing the SCORM.

I agree that a core feature will be great. But until then.. Thanks.

Joseph Francis

The solution is to use a 3rd-party provider which specializes in managing the distribution of your published learning content.

SCORM Cloud Dispatch

SCORM Cloud is a SaaS application that lets you manage all of your eLearning in one hosted platform. If you want to deliver your courses to learners via third-party LMS' but still maintain ownership and control of those courses, then SCORM Cloud Dispatch can help.

James Fairbairn

Dear Articulate Storyline,

Not everyone distributes e-learning on their own LMS. We provide off the shelf content that our customers want to host themselves. I don't imagine this is a terribly rare occurrence.

Can you please look into adding the expiry date functionality so that our content is secure even when distributed as a zip file.

Thanks.