PDF lessons allow you to easily upload PDF content for your students to view directly within the Thinkific Course Player!
In this article:
PDF Lesson From Your Student's Perspective
PDF Requirements and Recommendations
How to Create a PDF Lesson
- Go to Products
- Select Courses
- Click on a specific course in the Course Overview
- You will now be in the Course Curriculum area of the Course Builder
- On the left-hand side, click + Add lesson
- Select PDF
- Name the Lesson Title as desired
- In Uploaded PDF file block, drag & drop your desired PDF or click Browse files to locate the file on your computer
- Click Save lesson
PDF Lesson From Your Student's Perspective
Your PDF Lesson will now be viewable directly within the Course Player! You can always test out what it will look like by Previewing Your Course as a Student after you have saved your lesson.
PDF Downloads
By default, your PDF content will be downloadable when you first create your PDF lesson. If you would like to disable PDF download for this lesson, you can uncheck Make this PDF content downloadable.
We use a third party PDF viewer called PDF.js to display all PDF lessons; this allows us to better control the student experience and bypass the default behavior of your browser, which automatically allows for downloading and printing of any PDF. Using a third party viewer allows us to prevent this browser behavior, and ensure that students cannot download PDFs if you have this option disabled.
PDF Requirements and Recommendations
We limit PDF lessons to 25MB to provide the best viewing experience to your students, who may be accessing your course with slow internet connections or mobile devices. For delivery of larger files, use the Downloads lesson type instead for large file delivery!
A good best practice for longer PDF documents (ie: ebooks) is to break them into multiple PDF files based on lessons or chapters, rather than one large document, and to compress files prior to delivery using a tool like smallpdf.com. You can then add discussions, quizzes, and other content items to turn your ebook into a fully interactive course.