Practices For eLearning Content Security

You must consider protecting your intellectual property while creating a course online. Fortunately, there are several options to assist you with this, which can be categorized by content format and includes both technical and non-technical solutions.

Risks Of Copyright Infringement

We must carefully weigh the risks before publishing intellectual property online. There are many opportunities for content infringement and piracy because the majority of data is now housed online and is freely accessible. Even if the vast majority of search engines and platforms make every effort to provide content protection for the owners of intellectual property, there are still regrettable occurrences that the security technology may overlook.

The market for online education is where this will most likely occur. Professors and organizations design individualized online courses with content that serves several purposes and grant access to all students. In reality, the course moderators occasionally permit students to download learning resources only for the purpose of accelerating their learning curve. However, occasionally such content might be freely and uncreditedly reproduced and shared on other sites. You must be aware of the serious harm copyright infringement could do to you if you publish an online course and make it accessible to a lot of people.

How Copyright Infringement May Influence The Content Owner

1. Loss Of Traffic

Some of your site’s visitors might go to the cloned course. The issue is that original sources aren’t always recognized by search engines. As a result, they might present searchers with a variety of products that share similar content, which could lower the original website’s CTR and traffic volume.

2. Reader Loyalty Dwindles

Users won’t waste their time doing research, thus they’ll probably pick between your material and the copied content at random. Long-term credibility damage may result from this, particularly if the infringing website looks to be better visualized or receives more visitors and comments.

3. Search Engine Security Measures

Websites with original material are occasionally subject to search screening, but copycat sites are not penalized. In this situation, search engines may blacklist your course instead of the ones of the offenders, and you will need to defend your content in court or simply change it.

4. Long-Term Proceedings

Even if you were fortunate and able to catch the offender, you’ll need to show that you are the course owner, and there will be heated discussions over what should do next to deal with the situation.

Your best opportunity to stop plagiarism is to make downloading or copying difficult because some plagiarists are too indolent to handle simple problems. However, some of them may be steadfast in their pursuit of specific content, so those who design online courses must simply accept this reality and take appropriate action. Fortunately, there are many ways to stop plagiarism or the unauthorized use of intellectual property, depending on the content’s format (text, video, image, or audio). The top ones for each format are listed below.

Ways To Secure Various Forms Of Content

You probably did a fantastic job creating it if your material was found to be plagiarized. Even if the praise is undoubtedly what you wanted, attempt to see the bright side of the circumstance. But even when it’s a praise, you shouldn’t put up with copyright infringement. So, here are some ways to protect your online courses from theft as well as strategies for demonstrating your ownership of the original intellectual property.

1. Protecting Texts

-Information about copied material is tucked away in a different block.
A reference to the original source is given in a specific section of the text. The content containing the name of the website or business in it can be duplicated by a plagiarist without them even being aware of it.

–CSS may be used to turn off text selection highlighting.
This will function even if script execution is turned off. This approach will fall short if the criminal accesses the page’s source code and copies the text there.

-Stop using the clipboard for copies.
Your choice of building tools will affect this functionality. For this, each of them is configured differently.

-Exclusive pinging services
You can use one of the many pinging services that automatically notify users when new postings are made to your platform.

-Strong presence on social media
If you focus on promoting your online course, no one will dispute your ownership of the information because your social media history will back you up. Additionally, there is less likelihood that someone will simply copy and paste your course if it is well-known. In contrast to stealing from an unidentified source, this person will have serious difficulties in such a situation.

2. Securing Images

-Watermarks
This is the method that is used the most frequently worldwide. Although this is the most widely used method, it is important to be aware that there are other programs available to remove watermarks from photographs. Therefore, it is no longer the most secure.

-When downloading, the file is empty
Coding and development expertise are used to accomplish this. We can only hope that the offender would choose one of the simpler online options rather than trying to hack the image.

-By using the context menu, you can limit copying.
By altering plug-ins for the CMS, JavaScript, CSS, or jQuery, this can be achieved.

-Pictures with digital tagging
Instead of preventing plagiarism, this choice allows you to later demonstrate that the content was original (using the information regarding the camera used to take the shots, as well as the date, time, and place).

What Won’t Secure Your Content?

While not all of the aforementioned methods truly work to secure eLearning content, they are all at least partly successful in preventing content infringement. However, there are still a number of weak methods that people use to protect their intellectual property, such as employing built-in scripts to prevent content duplication. When dealing with websites that include built-in scripts, only the most ignorant plagiarists are unaware that they may easily see the page’s source code or disable scripts in the browser.

The second instance is when the proprietor of the course simply appends a link to the source material. The indicated link is thus placed at the end of the copied text fragment when it is pasted into the text field. This makes it simple to find and remove sources when necessary. As a result, this approach is not worthwhile.