Protecting a Course

Well the first thing to look into is an LMS. You would need to have access control in order to view your courses and an LMS can do that for you. As an added bonus you get SCORM tracking if you use an LMS.

That would sort out the access control. Sure you can do it with PHP as well, but an LMS (not open source) is more secure. Some LMS even offer the possibility to purchase access to courses via Paypal and then they get a personalized access to that particular course.

As for preventing the download of your files (Captivate swf's, voice and videofiles) that is almost impossible to achieve.

Anyone can download the swf files and decompile them. As for downloading video and audiofiles that is pretty easy aswell.

Captivate offers some features that you could use to make it more difficult for the downloaders to use the files. First of all you could add a password to your course that the user would need to enter before viewing it. It isn't very userfriendly, but it could be an option. Secondly you could add an expiration date to your project. Perhaps you could set your courses to expire at a given date. It would mean that you would have to upload a new course with a new expiration date often though.

Are you worried about people steal your course as a whole or just the content?

If you are worried about the course as a whole then you could make some custom flash components to load text, images, videos and audio into your Captivate project. That way you can have Captivate export these files as standalone files, which Captivate loads when needed. This would make it more difficult for anyone to download your entire project. Furthermore you could encrypt these files with SWF Encrypt ( http://www.amayeta.com).

You could add a Flash Tracker to your course (a flash file inserted in your project) that reports the location (url) of where your project is hosted. That way if someone steals your course and puts it on their own server you would have the url of where it's hosted and could go after them legally.

The last thing I can think of is to add another custom flash file on the first page of your captivate project. This file could pause the project and check if it is hosted on the correct domain. If that is the case then it would start to play your course. If not then it could display a custom message and not play the course. I'm working on developing such a file right now and when it's done I'll post some information on my website.

Well that's all I could think off. Maybe someone else have more things to offer.