Downloading Course Designer 3
The current version of Course Designer is Course Designer 4. If you do not own a license for Course Designer 3, you should Download Course Designer 4 instead of downloading Course Designer 3.
However, if you own a Course Designer 3 license and choose not to upgrade to Course Designer 4, you can still download Course Designer 3 if you need to reinstall Course Designer 3. This need can arise, for example, if you sell or discard your original computer, or replace your computer's hard drive.
If you are planning on upgrading to Course Designer 4, there is no need to first install Course Designer 3 on your new computer. You do not need to have Course Designer 3 on your computer to be eligible for Course Designer 4's upgrade price; all that matters is that the Course Designer database has a record of you as owning a Course Designer 3 license. And if you need to open and/or save courses in the Course Designer 3 file format, you can still do both of those things in Course Designer 4.
Most active Course Designer users are now using Course Designer 4. If you'd like to open courses that are sent to you in the Course Designer 4 file format, you will need to use Course Designer 4. An "active" Course Designer user here means a Course Designer licensee who still at least takes the time to get a replacement activation code when they get a new computer. As of mid-2023, more than 95% of even the replacement activation codes that are needed are for Course Designer 4. All original activation codes issued for licenses bought since September 2012 have also been for Course Designer 4.
Notice: Course Designer 3 no longer works 'natively' on a Mac. Course Designer 3 was built on top of a part of macOS called "Carbon". In July of 2012, Apple "deprecated" all of Carbon, giving notice to developers that with some release of macOS Apple would remove Carbon from macOS with little or no further prior warning. Starting with the High Sierra release, Carbon applications such as Course Designer 3 will no longer work. Because Carbon was to be deprecated, the Mac-specific portion of Course Designer was completely rewritten from scratch for Course Designer 4 to use a newer part of macOS called Cocoa, instead of using Carbon at all. No end of life date has been announced for Cocoa.
The Windows version of Course Designer 3 is still able to run on all versions of the Mac including High Sierra and later. To do this, you will need to install some technology that allows Windows programs to run on your Mac. Technology that has been tested and in use includes the paid/supported applications CrossOver and Parallels. Free/unsupported applications also known to work but which may require some technical knowledge include PlayOnMac and Wine.
Download Now (English Windows version)
Download Now (English Mac version) See Mac Installation below.
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System Requirements
Windows
Course Designer 3 runs on any of the following versions of Microsoft Windows: XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, 11.
Mac
Course Designer 3 requires an Intel Mac (not PowerPC),
running macOS 10.6.8 (latest Snow Leopard),
10.7 (Lion), 10.8 (Mountain Lion), 10.9 (Mavericks), 10.10 (Yosemite), 10.11 (El Capitan) or 10.12 (Sierra).
Mac Installation
On Snow Leopard, installing Course Designer 3 on a Mac is rather straight-forward. After clicking the Download Now (Mac) link above, Installer starts up automatically as soon as the download is complete. Unfortunately, the version of Safari that comes with Lion and Mountain Lion behaves differently than previous versions of Safari, and requires a more complicated installation procedure. And the new Gatekeeper feature in Mountain Lion makes installation on Mountain Lion or Mavericks even more complicated than on Lion.
Before installing on Mountain Lion or later:
- Open System Preferences.
- Click on the Security and Privacy icon.
- If the lock in the bottom left corner of the window is displayed as being locked, click on the lock, and enter your password to confirm that you want to make changes to your Security and Privacy settings.
- On the General tab, for "Allow applications downloaded from", select "Anywhere".
Installation on Lion or later:
- In Safari, click the Download Now (Mac) link above to start the download. During the download, the download progress will be displayed on a little toolbar button called "Show downloads" in the top right corner of the Safari window.
- When the download is complete, the "Show downloads" button will display a downward-pointing arrow. Click the "Show downloads" button to open the "Downloads" window.
- Double-click on the downloaded file, crcd331en.dmg . This will open a Finder window that shows a file called crcd331en.pkg . On pre-Mavericks versions of Safari, Safari unfortunately opens the new window behind the Safari window, so you may need to move the Safari window to see the new Finder window.
- Double-click the crcd331en.pkg file to open Installer. The installation process is rather straight-forward once Installer is open.
