If you are concerned about content security and want to prevent students from selecting and copying text within your course, you can disable text copying at the course level.
This is not available with the Legacy Course Player. If you are missing this feature, see how to update your Course Player here!
About This Feature
Sometimes your students may want to copy text from your lessons to save for future reference. If you would like to prevent this as well as make it less likely that your students will share course content outside of Thinkific, you can disable text copying. This will prevent students from having the ability to copy text and right click within a lesson in the Course Player. This setting can be applied at a per course level.
How It Works
When right clicking in your browser, you will usually see a context menu which includes several options like:
- Dictionary Look Up
- Copy/Paste
- Speech Options
When text copying is disabled, this default browser context menu will not be visible. Instead a student will see the following notification when they attempt to right click or copy highlighted text in a lesson:
How to Disable Text Copying
- Go to Manage Learning Content
- Select Courses
- Click on a specific course in the Course Overview to open the Course Builder
- Select the Settings tab
- Make sure you have Basic Settings selected
- Under Security, check off Disable text copying
- Scroll to the top of the page and click Save
Lessons Types
When this setting is enabled, it will disable text selection and copying in all lesson types within your course that include text within the body of the lesson. This includes:
Important Considerations
This feature does not prevent students from finding other workarounds for making a copy of your content like taking a screenshot or physical note taking. Due to the nature of content being delivered in the browser, this is not something that we can completely eliminate, however we have found that the overwhelming majority of people who will pay for access to an online course are honourable. We also have some additional recommendations for discouraging unauthorized sharing of your content here: Is My Content Secure on Thinkific?
Disabling text copying can also affect the accessibility of your lesson content. Screen readers will still be usable, however options available within the browser context menu like Google's Speech option will not be available: