 |
 |
Hi All, I'm intrigued as to why one would put something on Blackboard and then want legitimate students not to be able to copy it...... or at least why one would imagine it was possible to protect at all. If it's going to be published, wait until it is. -- Regards Mark Mark Gamble Head of e-Learning Learning Technology University of Bedfordshire Tel (+44)1582 489260 Fax (+44)1582 489259 Mob 07720 068605 Int ext 2260 / 6360 (mobex) >>> Gary Smith <[log in to unmask]> 03/31/09 5:37 PM >>> Nuno Fonseca wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > Does any one know how to stop students from copying content from word > documents from Blackboard content areas(course documents), apart from > the adaptive release feature? > > > > Your help would be much appreciated. > There's no real way of doing this that can't be circumvented. Essentially, if it's available on the web (including Blackboard), it's capable of being copied. Such circumventions may get more extreme, the more roadblocks you put in the way, but the truly evil mind/bored student/someone like me would look at ways around things like this for fun (no, really, I do...) These might include (starting at the most likely): o Firefox NoScript extension o Firefox/IE JS/Java being disabled o Pulling files/text out of browser caches o Screenshotting the files/text and then popping them through an OCR reader to give a proper text document o Capturing the data stream as it comes down and rebuilding the file from that. This is doable, but needs a hell of a lot of work, so isn't likely to happen, moreso (ie it's impossible) if you're running Blackboard in a secure environment (ie through SSL). If you're interested, I've done quite a lot of work in content/copy protection, primarily of images (jpegs) in another project I'm involved with, so would be happy to talk more about this. Contact me offlist if you need. Gary