With School Systems switching to eLearning, educational content providers need a secure digital distribution method for their intellectual property (IP).
According to The World Economic Forum, “The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in schools shut all across the world.” As of April 2020, “globally, over 1.2 billion children were out of the classroom.” As a result, digital learning has been pushed into the spotlight.
As schools began to close, and stay-at-home-orders were enforced, digital education became the only way that students and professionals furthering their education could continue their studies from home. Educational content quickly shifted from physical textbooks and printed worksheets to their digital equivalents.
What we’re seeing though, is that even as educational facilities are experimenting with opening back up, digital learning is here to stay. Digital learning isn’t just a temporary fix to help the world keep going for a few months, it’s the future. To stay competitive, educational content providers must keep up with the new demand for digital learning that will only continue increasing.
One reason for this is that online learning may actually help students retain more of what they are consuming. The World Economic Forum said:
“Some research shows that on average, students retain 25-60% more material when learning online compared to only 8-10% in a classroom.”
Having access to online learning also gives students more time with their study materials to better understand what they are being taught.
Digital learning has already been used for years by college students who can’t or don’t want to commute to a campus, but want to continue their education. Now, thanks in large part to the pandemic accelerating the transition, access to education content online is being viewed as a welcome alternative that helps lessen the burden for primary and secondary schools as well.
The simple fact is that digital education opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for educational content and its providers. Educational content providers that switch to digital will drastically cut down on their shipping and printing costs and, as a result, they should see their margins and sales growth.
Going digital also allows content providers to target a larger audience, more schools, more states, and more countries. Educational content providers that sell primarily to US school markets may find transitioning and selling their content to Canadian schools a relatively easy transition, and vice versa, especially with the free trade agreement, NAFTA and a similar school structure (K-12) with the curriculum being set by the province and rolled out by school districts.
With these new possibilities, however, comes the need for digital content protection to guard the valuable intellectual property that you are creating and selling to schools, districts, teachers, and is being consumed by students everywhere.
Protect Your Educational Content From Unauthorized Access
Selling educational content to schools and school districts is a complex business. As schools scrambled to take their K-12 lessons online at the height of the pandemic, there were several hiccups to say the very least. From figuring out how to use Zoom, Google Classroom, or Microsoft Teams for teaching classes, to determining the best method for distributing study materials, it was a steep learning curve. Social media pages, Facebook groups, and LinkedIn groups were flooded with teachers reaching out to other fellow teachers and administrators for advice.
Unfortunately, with those requests for advice, teachers were also sharing lesson plans, lectures, and other content with one another. Over the course of just a few months, websites like Share My Lesson where teachers can share educational content had significant jumps in traffic as instructors rushed to help each other with the transition to teaching online.
A textbook excerpt here, a worksheet there. What’s the harm in helping out a fellow teacher? If you’re in the content creation business, there is potential for significant harm. Every share could result in a loss of revenue for your company. After all, why would anyone buy what they can obtain for free?
As we navigate these new, uncharted waters, it’s more important than ever that you protect your educational content from unauthorized access. The question is, how can you maintain control of your content and ensure that teachers and students in one school or district don't share your content with another school or district who hasn't licensed or paid for your content? The answer is with content protection software, and for that you need VitriumOne.
Content Distribution Software That Makes It Easy to Protect and Distribute Your Educational Materials
Vitrium's content protection and digital rights management (DRM) technology has long been the gold standard in protecting and controlling content for documents, images, videos, and audio files.
Our new product, VitriumOne, co-developed with our partner, Blue Flamingo, not only takes advantage of this technology, but it also solves the distribution problem that a lot of educational content providers face when selling into the K-12 school market - how to distribute their content from the school district (or council) to schools, to teachers, to students, while still maintaining control over their content licensing and their intellectual property.
With VitriumOne you can manage the distribution of lessons, eBooks, audio and video files, and any other type of content across school districts and schools, as well as teachers and students. Set permissions for user access, such as download and sharing restrictions, with the click of a button. Your content will be secure, but your authorized users will be able to access their materials with ease.
In addition, Vitrium's powerful web viewer technology keeps getting better and this year, due to the increasing demand from teachers and students alike, Vitrium added even more annotations capabilities. Teachers and students can now draw, highlight, add notes, text, or other comments directly onto the digital workbook.
Learn more about how VitriumOne can help you safely distribute your educational content by requesting a demo today.
