In order to provide learners with the experience they expect, seamless access must be guaranteed from sign-on throughout the entire consumption process. Access must be anytime, anywhere, online, offline, and with any device. While this leads to a greatly improved learning experience, it does lead to new security concerns.
Organizations invest a massive amount of resources into their training content. This material can be of high value and should be protected from piracy, and while there is no way to stop a determined pirate from making a copy of your printed content, you can keep an eye on user activity through dashboards. Digital content solutions ought to include reporting dashboards where content creators and administrators can see how content is being digested. A key reporting feature is seeing how many pages of a piece of content are printed at the overall or individual user level (content creators often give users the option to print their digital materials). If analytics reveal a user is printing thousands of pages, that is a good starting point to take action and address potential piracy. Such insight is impossible with print, where thieves can simply photocopy as many pages as they’d like without the publisher knowing.
A more technical and elegant approach is through digital rights management (DRM). A DRM scheme puts in reasonable restrictions and allows for online use and downloading, while maintaining control over license terms.
To learn more about the trends and benefits to digital content, download “The New Training Content Paradigm”.