Protecting PDFs

[junderwood]

How many of you protect the PDFs that you offer as resources in your courses? I offer a resource called "Presenter Notes" as PDFs for all of my lectures. These "notes" are the substance of my lectures. I protect them from being edited or printed by anyone who doesn't have the password to do so. Does anyone else do this? If so, have you had any complaints from students? Thanks.

[Gokul · Accepted solution]

No. I normally do not do that. However, if you have worked hard into that, then you should definitely protect your content. Students will no complain about it. 

[Gokul · Accepted solution]

No. I normally do not do that. However, if you have worked hard into that, then you should definitely protect your content. Students will no complain about it. 

[junderwood]

Thanks, Gokul. I published my course in January and got my first complaint about password protecting my PDFs yesterday. I should have asked before I put them up. Live and learn! Thanks again for responding!

[GregReverdiau · Accepted solution]

@junderwood 

I usually don't offer those for my Udemy courses. Not a bad idea to protect them for sure. Know that some PDF viewers can easily get around those limitations though. 

[junderwood]

Thanks, Greg. I published my course here in January. I've taught this course in other venues, including on my personal course server, and it always gets good reviews. These other platforms often provided printed copies of the lectures and I provided them on my personal course server, so I didn't think anything about providing them as resources here. Then yesterday, a student asked me to unprotect them so she could have hard copies of the lectures. Probably innocent, but it got me to thinking that even providing these PDFs probably isn't a good idea. Thank you for your response.