Question
- Is there a way to limit a student's login credentials to one IP address?
- How can I stop my students from sharing their sign in credentials?
Solution
Currently, there is no way to prevent students from sharing their sign in credentials for your Thinkific site based on IP address, frequent sign ins, or any other criteria. This is so students have the convenience of accessing their accounts and course progress from any device they may own and from multiple locations such as work, home, or school. We don't want to limit student access, as a student's learning experience is often the deciding factor in which online education journey they select.
With that being said, we know that content security is a priority for our Course Creators, and there are a couple of tools that we can suggest if you are seeing suspicious behavior on your Thinkific site.
Student IP Address and Sign In Count
If you're concerned about a specific student or students, you can closely monitor their sign in count and IP address. A student's IP address will update with the network they are using every time they sign in.
This information can be accessed from the Users table (on any Thinkific plan, including Free) and exported as a CSV report (on the Basic plan or higher):
- Select Support Your Students from the menu on the left-hand side of your Admin Dashboard
- Click Users
- Click the Columns button
- Check the option for an IP Address column
- Scroll right in the Users table to view the IP Address and Sign in count columns
- Optional: Click the Export button to have a CSV report of your users sent to your email
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is an analytics platform that tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications. This third-party integration provides more granular information about how your students interact with your content. Mixpanel also provides a Sign In Count and a Unique Device ID whenever someone accesses your content, which may help isolate suspicious login behaviors.
Handling Incidents of Login Sharing
We understand that academic honesty and content security are important standards for our Course Creators. For this reason, we typically see Course Creators outlining consequences for login sharing in their Terms of Use - including unenrolling students and deleting students' accounts.
While it is completely up to your discretion to determine how to handle these incidents, if you are seeing a large amount of suspicious activity on your site, or have any feature suggestions or feedback for us on this topic, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.
Important Considerations
- A student account can only have one enrollment in a course. For this reason, students are not able to save multiple profiles of course progress in one account. If students are sharing a set of sign in credentials, the last user who signs into an account will overwrite the progress of any other users using the account. Additionally, the Thinkific Course Player will resume a course at the point where the last user who was signed in left off.
- If you are offering a Thinkific Certificate for your course, an account can only claim one certificate per course. This means users are unable to use the same account to claim certificates for multiple students sharing sign in credentials.