Course Hero is an online study platform that is aimed firmly at students.
It has over 30 million different study resources available for users to download and use and these cover a wide variety of different materials, such as study guides, videos, practice problems, and course notes.
It’s a community-driven platform where members are expected to give back as well as use the materials.
As part of the Course Hero model, members have to share their own documents for other members to access.
These documents are then stored on Course Hero and indexed so they’re available to anyone who requests them.
However, what do you do if you want to delete your documents from Course Hero? Is this possible? How can you do this?
In this article, we will look at how to delete Course Hero documents.
What Is Course Hero?
Course Hero is a community-driven online learning platform. It has over 30 million documents and resources that members can access on a wide variety of different study topics.
Whether you are looking for practice questions, class notes, videos, or study guides on your chosen subject, you’re sure to find them on Course Hero!
The materials on Course Hero have largely been uploaded by the members. Most members are students themselves but there are some resources and uploaded files that have been shared by educators as well.
Course Hero aims to help you through your education. For example, if you miss a class, instead of having to ask your teacher or a fellow student for notes that cover that topic, you will be able to find them on Course Hero.
If an explanation given by a teacher or in a textbook is difficult for you to understand, look on Course Hero to find another explanation. You can also find practice problems to help reinforce your learning.
How Does Course Hero Work?
As a member of Course Hero, you will have two options on how to access the resources on the platform.
Subscription
The first option is to subscribe to Course Hero. You can subscribe annually, monthly, or quarterly. Annually is the cheapest option and costs $119.40 for the year (the equivalent of $9.95 per month.)
For quarterly memberships, the rate is $59.85 (or $19.95) and the monthly membership costs $39.95. (See also ‘Does Course Hero Have A Free Trial? Here’s How to Sign Up‘)
These prices may be expensive for many students so Course Hero offers another option.
Upload Materials
It is possible to use Course Hero on a free basis and without having a subscription. To do this, you need to upload your own documents and resources to the site to access the documents already on Course Hero.
For every 10 documents you upload to Course Hero, you will be able to unlock and download five documents of your choice.
When you create a free membership with Course Hero, you will be able to see the titles of the resources available but will not be able to access them.
If you do find resources or documents that you want to view, you will need to either subscribe or upload your own documents to unlock them. (Check out ‘Can I Cancel Course Hero Anytime? Guide‘)
How To Delete Course Hero Documents
If you choose to pursue the free membership, this means that Course Hero will store at least ten of your documents on its servers for others to access. Unfortunately, deleting them is not an easy process.
The Terms of Use for Course Hero state:
You agree that the licenses you grant are royalty-free, perpetual, transferable, sublicensable, irrevocable, and worldwide.
You understand and agree that if you press ‘delete account’ in your account settings, your Submissions will remain on the Services and to the extent that they were downloaded or stored by other Users.
This means that when you sign up for Course Hero and agree to use their service, you are also giving Course Hero permission to permanently host your documents and you have no right to delete them or ask for them to be deleted.
Even if you delete your Course Hero account completely, your uploaded documents will remain on Course Hero and the site is under no legal obligation to delete them.
Many users have struggled to delete their documents from Course Hero for these reasons. There is, however, one situation where Course Hero will delete documents.
Deleting Documents For Copyright Infringement
Like any company on the Internet, Course Hero is bound by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
This act covers copyright and intellectual property rights and states that online service providers cannot host material that infringes on the copyright or intellectual property rights of someone.
You can ask Course Hero to delete your documents if you feel hosting them is a breach of the DMCA and of your intellectual property rights.
Course Hero is bound to either disable access or outright delete any materials in this circumstance. They may also terminate the accounts of anyone caught uploading copyright material.
If you think the documents on Course Hero infringe your intellectual property rights or copyright, you can submit a takedown notice to Course Hero.
You will need to provide Course Hero with all of the relevant information such as your personal details, the URL of the material, and the title.
You can batch-add multiple documents to the same form but will need to provide the specific URL and title of each.
You can begin this process by clicking the link:
If you don’t want to complete the form, you can send the relevant information through the post or email. The details on how to do that can be found here:
Tips For Uploading Documents To Course Hero
The easiest way to delete documents to Course Hero is to not upload any documents that need deleting in the first place.
The only course is through a copyright takedown and this process can take days to complete. We have a few tips you can follow to try and reduce the number of documents you may want to delete.
If you are going to upload documents to Course Hero, always double-check them to make sure there is no identifying information.
Check for names, email addresses, and school names. These details will be visible to anyone who accesses your documents!
Don’t use any copyrighted material or any personal information online that you’re not willing to share. Think carefully about the materials being shared and whether you really want strangers on the Internet to have access to them.
Final Thoughts
In this article, we looked at how you can delete documents and resources from Course Hero.
One of Course Hero’s main methods of operation involves members uploading documents to the site in order to access and download materials from other users.
This means that many members have a large number of documents hosted by Course Hero.
You can’t delete your documents from Course Hero yourself. Even deleting your account will not delete your documents. Course Hero is only bound to delete an uploaded file, or documents when intellectual property rights have been infringed.
