Protecting Your Digital Education Content

Over 1.2 billion learners were out of the classroom in April 2020. As schools began to close due to COVID-19 and stay-at-home-orders were enforced, in-person learning became an impossibility.

Thus, digital education became the only way that students could continue their studies from home.

Educational content quickly shifted from physical textbooks and printed worksheets to their digital equivalents, and even as educational facilities open back up, it is clear that eLearning is more than a temporary fix for a temporary problem...

..it is the future of education.

Now, thanks in large part to the pandemic accelerating the transition, access to education content online is being viewed as a welcome alternative. One that not only provides students with an alternative to in-person schooling, as well as the ability to continue their education regardless of world events, but also helps lessen the burden for primary and secondary schools.

On the other hand, going digital also facilitates the opportunity of selling content and offering distance education to international markets, allowing content providers to target a broader audience. More schools, states, and more countries. Educational content providers that sell primarily to US school markets, for example, may find transitioning and selling their content to Canadian schools a relatively easy process, and vice versa. A similar school structure (K-12) where the curriculum is set by the province and rolled out by school districts, and the free trade agreement NAFTA help expedite this transition.

The simple fact is that digital education opens up a whole new realm of possibilities regarding educational content.

For one, content providers that switch to digital will drastically cut down on their shipping and printing costs, potentially stimulating margin and sales growth.

Factors expected to drive continued market growth include:

• Increasing importance of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education
• Rising number of offerings from ed-tech companies
• Increasing number of enrollments in K-12 and online education
• Pervasive use of tablets and smartphones

However, along with new digital learning possibilities and digital content distribution comes a new set of challenges regarding content protection and control. The need to guard the valuable intellectual property you as a content provider are creating and selling, becomes pressing.

It's hardly surprising that websites such as Teachers Pay Teachers, and other open marketplaces for educational resources, have more than three million paid and free resources available for download. Share My Lesson has more than 1.7 million members sharing and downloading educational content.

Teachers often use these sites as a shortcut that allows them to spend more time focused on teaching and less time preoccupied with developing teaching materials.

The challenge with websites like these, and free forums such as Facebook Groups and Linkedin Groups, is that without adequate content protection set in place, educational materials are at high risk of being distributed freely.

Valuable content that has cost businesses time and money to produce can be unlawfully shared millions of times, effectively hurting their bottom line. From ebooks, worksheets and lesson plans to videos and other educational materials, the precious Intellectual Property (IP) your company is working hard to produce is well-deserving of ironclad content protection.

Ultimately you’ve wasted time, effort, money and resources in developing and marketing your educational content if it’s not protected. Educational content providers also face challenges on how best to distribute content when selling to the K-12 market. With multiple levels of hierarchy and staff users spread across school districts, in addition to classes and students, it’s imperative to maintain control over distribution.

With the right system, you can maintain control of your content and ensure that teachers and students in one school or district don't share your content with another school, district or individual who has not paid for the right to access your content. Without the right protection, you are at risk of revenue loss, devaluation of your content and competitors stealing your intellectual property.

Designed specifically for educational content providers that sell their content to the K-12 or primary/secondary school markets, VitriumOne is the content distribution software that allows you to:

• Effectively protect a wide variety of content
• set up lessons, courses and modules apply different permissions to schools, teachers, and students
• Set expiration controls and device limitations for those who access the material
• Prevent unauthorized sharing and downloading of files with the click of a button

They will be able to enjoy a mobile-friendly website that is fully outfitted with your unique branding. VitriumOne is fully customizable, which means that you can freely include logos, colors, and background images.

You can even choose to use your own subdomain to further adapt VitriumOne to your brand. Moreover, as a content provider, you are granted the ability to upload your content straight from the VitriumOne platform and subsequently allocate it to different users. For example, you might grant access for specific content to certain school districts or schools.

This content, then, is made available under license to teachers and students. By activating a unique code for students, teachers can grant access to your content for however long you wish. In this regard, you can easily protect and distribute your educational content through the hierarchy of the K-12 or primary/secondary school system. You can manage different user types (school districts, schools, teachers, and students) and ensure content is accessed solely by those who purchase.

Additionally, VitriumOne allows you to organize your content by setting up courses, modules, lessons, and files, which can be then separated into teacher files and student files. This gives you the opportunity to simplify the process of distributing your content, while still ensuring that it is not violated. Your users will be able to log-in and engage with the content with ease, and your content, as well as your revenue and profits, will be thoroughly