Selling elearning - securely, both to individuals and corporate
Oct 27, 2012
Hi all! I have read many of the previous posts on similar topics but I am still not finding the answer. I am in the process of developing eLearning to sell commercially and the target market is both individuals and corporations. The content will be available for 6 months to a year. I would like to host the content on my own website using Moodle when for an individual, andI would like to offer the elearning lessons (they are in a secure flash format) to the coporate clients. When I sell to corporations, how would I limit their use to one year and prevent them from distributing the flash files? I currently am looking at using Locklizard to protect the files, but that requires all the students to install the application on their computer and the license on the their computer in order to view the secure flash files. I would like to offer a service to load into their LMS, but I am not familiar how I could easily do this or what my effort would be to do it.
Any and all suggestions are welcome. I do not want to host it on another website (like Open Sesame) simply because I don't want to pay someone else 40% of revenues.
Thanks!
2 Replies
Hi Jocelyn, and welcome to the Heroes forums..
I've been trying to answer your question for about 12 years now, and have not come up with an answer.
The best I can do is these 3 points:
1> Is there a 2nd hand bookshop near where you live? If so - then the authors are not receiving income from the 2 sale onwards. That's the way that selling knowledge has always worked - it's not something new for the eLearning industry to fret over.
2> Nothing will ever stop someone buying one copy of your course, then putting an amplifier and speakers on their PC, and showing it to a room full of people.
3> Something like opensesame.com is probably the solution - if you do not like the price hike, increase your price until the lost % is an acceptable price to pay for perceived security of your IP, like 10-15% or something. Nothing comes for free. Think of them like having a Global sales channel/salesperson for your courses, in which case it's probably very good value.
Hope that helps in some way.
Bruce
Hi Jocelyn
I'm not quite clear on what you mean by "a secure flash format" but if it's Flash, you can acquire the user's system date from their computer quite easily - thus you could quite easily specify a date after which the program would no longer work. In coding terms it's basically something that says "if the date exceeds X, then do nothing"
To get around it the user could go into the control panel of their computer and change their system date into the past, but nobody would really do that in practice these days (as the date and time on most computers will try to calibrate itself every time you restart the machine I think).
Hope that helps
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