We have a prof using content from a publisher. The license agreement states that we need to prevent the students from making copies or downloading the content. Is there a way to post the publisher made Power Points and protect them from being saved to a student's hard drive or copied by the student?
Hi Heather,
With the nature of web browser and Office documents, it is not possible to prevent students from downloading PowerPoint files. Obviously the publisher does not really understand how Office documents such as PowerPoint PPT files are displayed when posted on the web sites including LMSs like Blackboard.
Non-HTML documents, such as PowerPoint PPT files are always downloaded to the local system, usually in a temporary Internet folder and displayed inside the native application such as PowerPoint or a viewer/player such as the PowerPoint Viewer. There is no way to display a PowerPoint PPT file from a web browser with the file remaining on the server. Most people do not realize that with Internet Explorer, PowerPoint is actually running inside a frame of the browser. Those of us with FireFox and Safari are very aware of how PPT files are downloaded and PowerPoint is launch to view and even save the PPT file to a local drive.
About your best option is to convert the PowerPoint files into secure PDF files that include the options to prevent students from printing or saving the PDF file. Another option is to convert the PowerPoint into a video file that is streamed from a server.
However, a secure PDF or streaming video does not prevent the students from using a screen capture utility or a digital camera to grab images of the file from the screen.
Hope this helps...
Cheers,
Bob
Password on PDF files protect from viewing and there is solutions with one time passwords.