Deliberate exclusion or access denial Storyline course

May 07, 2014

I was asked to arrange 'deliberate  exclusion' on a course, or range off  courses, published with Articulate Storyline.

The courses are sold to a third party, that will host them in their own Learning Management System.


The commercial intention is to only grant access to 

  • a given number off users 
  • for a given period off time, like 10 months.

So the Storyline course(s) have to give a access denial, after X users or after a expiry date.

Is this technical possible, feasible,achievable, separate from its desirability ?

3 Replies
Alexandros Anoyatis

Hi Bea,

You can't reliably track users from within Storyline, so requirement A cannot be fulfilled.


However you can restrict the period of time by getting the current date via JS, parse it to get three variables and then apply a conditional trigger in the beginning of the course testing against those variables. But even this can easily be circumvented if the clients browser has javascript disabled or they backdate the system clock.

The only way to achieve what you require is via an external server side script which will reside on your own servers and will check if the above requirements are met.

Alex

Steve Flowers

The downside to current date via JS is it's based on the client configuration. So changing the workstation clock would defeat this method. Still a deterrent but not foolproof. 

One thing you might try is setting up a server on your side to grab unique user access with an AJAX call from the course. Sending this to a database or even to a Google Spreadsheet, you could easily calculate unique access counts. This wouldn't shut down the training but it would give you information you could use to notify the client that they were at the limit of their license. I wouldn't do this without letting the client know you're collecting information.

Bea Stephan

Thanks, for this input. I guess this is what it is, but I still wait if some unexpected solutions or idea's come along.

If we can host it for our client on Articulate Online then a group permission for that company and subgroups would work.

But if the client host the Articulate Storyline themselves, it is an other issue.

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