Unit 7 – Copyright, eTexts and OER

Module Overview

In this module, we will focus copyright/fair use in education, open educational resources (OER), and open/freely available etexts.

Goals

  1. Describe copyright/fair use as they apply to online teaching
  2. Be able to list resources for obtaining copyright free resources and where to request copyright clearance at MSU
  3. Know of places where open educational content is available, be able to find other spaces
  4. Be able to find places for openly available texts useful for online teaching

Module Schedule

Rather than have any mandatory assignments in this module, I’ve instead given you a large number of activities to work on with regard to Audio, Video, Images, and Copyright. As you work through this material keep in mind that while you should read over all of the materials if a certain activity or suggestion doesn’t tie in with the work you are doing on your course you do not need to spend a lot of time on it.

  • Copyright and Fair Use
  • Open Educational Resources (OER)
  • Etexts

Readings

Jones, J.B. (2010). 5 Resources on Copyright Activism (The DMCA STILL Needs to Die). Profhacker.com, Retrieved October 14, 2010.

Logie, J. (2006).  Copyright in Increasingly Digital Academic Contexts: What it Takes. WIDE Research Center 2006 Conference.

Weller, M., Jordan, K., DeVries, I., & Rolfe, V. (2018). Mapping the open education landscape: citation network analysis of historical open and distance education research. Open Praxis, 10(2).

Copyright and Fair Use

Overview of Copyright and Fair Use

What is Fair Use?

Fair use is a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism. However, if the copyright owner disagrees with your fair use interpretation, the dispute will have to be resolved by courts or arbitration. If it’s not a fair use, you are infringing upon the rights of the copyright owner and may be liable for damages. The only guidance is provided by a set of fair use factors outlined in the copyright law. These factors are weighed in each case to determine whether a use qualifies as a fair use, but weighing fair use factors is often quite subjective. Fair use of copyrighted items is often more permissible in not-for-profit educational uses.

What does it mean to use an item for “educational purposes”?

  • Non-commercial instruction or curriculum-based teaching by educators to students at nonprofit educational institutions
  • Planned non-commercial study or investigation directed toward making a contribution to a field of knowledge, or
  • Presentation of research findings at non-commercial peer conferences, workshops or seminars.

What is the TEACH Act?

The TEACH Act (Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization Act) was created in November 2002 to extend in a limited way the exemptions allowed face-to-face teachers when using copyright-protected materials in nonprofit educational settings. Providing the requirements of the TEACH Act are followed, entire non-dramatic works and limited portions of other performances may be transmitted to students without first obtaining copyright permission.

  • The content must be “A regular part of mediated instructional activity,” “Made by, at the direction of, or under the supervision of the instructor,” and “Directly related and of material assistance to the content of the course.”
  • The content must “be accessible only to those students who are enrolled in the course,” “be accessible only for the duration of a class session,” “be protected from further distribution (“downstream-controlled”),” “not be subject to retention by students.
  • All material displayed under the TEACH Act must contain the notice: The materials on this course website are only for the use of students enrolled in this course for purposes associated with this course and may not be retained or further disseminated. The materials on this course website may be protected by copyright; any further use of this material may be in violation of federal copyright law.
  • Further, no existing licensed digital copy is available for use at the University and only the portion needed for transmission may be digitized.
  • Penn State has a good website overviewing the TEACH Act at http://copyright.psu.edu/psu-policy/teach-act/
  • Stanford also has a good website overviewing fair use at https://fairuse.stanford.edu/

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons licenses enable content creators to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others, essentially licensing content with a “some rights reserved” mindset. There are a variety of options for licensing items with Creative Commons, most involving the opportunities for others to build off of and modify your content in not-for-profit situations and while providing attribution. The intent is to avoid some of the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing and remixing of information. You can find items that are available with a Creative Commons license on many websites including http://www.flickr.com/ and http://search.creativecommons.org/

So What Does This Mean for Me as a Teacher?

While issues of Fair Use and application of the TEACH act show promise for uninhibited, legal use of copyright-protected items for situations involving teaching and learning there has been no common understanding of how this and other copyright law is to be applied in all teaching and learning contexts. Due to the subjective nature of applying the TEACH act, I encourage you to use content freely available for inclusion in online environments and/or request permission from the copyright holder through the MSU Copyright office at http://copyright.lib.msu.edu/

Finding Copyright Free Images and Video/Audio

Below are several links to sources of content that are copyright free. Please browse through the sites and bookmark them for later so you can find other content for your course.

Suggestions for Obtaining Content for Use in Online Instruction

There are many options for including content in the online portions of your courses, below are several options to start you on finding appropriate content for use in your teaching.

  • Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/
    Flickr is an online photo sharing site that allows users to automatically license their content with creative commons attributes. Using the advanced search you can identify pictures that can be used in courses or presentations by selecting the “search creative commons licensed content” option.
  • Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/
    Hundreds of royalty free photos for use
  • Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/
    The Internet Archive provides access to thousands of audio, video and text works that are available for linking and embedding in courses.
  • Library Electronic Resources: http://er.lib.msu.edu/
    Many of the electronic resources the MSU Library subscribes to allow the option of creating direct links from your online course to the items available in the library e-resources. Creating direct links allows you to maintain reading lists from scholarly journals without the need for uploading .pdf or text documents.
  • Links to Internet Sources:
    Often a simple web search will yield the content you are looking for or an acceptable alternative. Be specific with your search and patient when sifting through search results, often the best resources aren’t found on the first few results pages.

Living with Copyright Restrictions

  • Copyright law is very limiting to our teaching in some respects, but it’s something we have to live with. Below are some suggestions for ways to make the web work for you in this respect.
  • Please remember that anything you can link to is fair game! Often you can find many of the content pieces you want by doing a simple search using Google. Make sure to go through all the results and to view more than just one page of search results.
  • If you are considering showing a Hollywood video in your class you may have several options if you take some time to search for them. Another good option for showing Hollywood videos or regular television shows is to rely on streaming and rental sites such as Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, etc. where students can get the movies either for free or a small cost.

Further Resources on Copyright

Open Educational Resources (OER)

OER are freely available and open (often with the ability to remix or re-use) content that are designed to support teaching and learning. In the United States OER often refer to eTextbooks (see section below on etexts) but they also encompass a wide range of text, media and other digital assets used in teaching and learning. OER range from individual images or short videos to entire Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) such as those offered by Coursera.

MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org/)is a peer-reviewed exchange area for learning objects in all subjects and is one of the first repositories of OER. Objects are available for embedding in courses and faculty can also contribute their own resources to the site.

https://www.oercommons.org/ is a great resource for finding some subject specific content. While the content on the site errs towards K12, its Open Author tool is useful for creating your own content.

EDUCAUSE, the organization for IT in Higher Education, produces a series called “Seven Things You Should Know About…” and has featured OER in three areas

Thinking questions: What are other OER resources you are aware of? Are there areas in particular you are looking for resources?

eTexts

eTexts are digitally accessible texts (often free) that can be used in teaching and learning. eTexts are a subset of OER, but make up the majority of the OER landscape in the United States. There are many eTexts available on just about any topic. Below are a series of links to spaces that have eTexts available for use.

OpenStax (https://cnx.org/) has a collection of freely available etextbooks on a variety of topics

Open Textbook Library (https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/) serves as a clearing house for open texts on a variety of topics

Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/) is a well known library for classic literature, but contains copies of many other titles including non-fiction works. The Hathi Trust (https://www.hathitrust.org/) digital library is also useful for finding texts.

Internet Archives Open Library (https://openlibrary.org/) is another spot to look for a variety of books that are freely available.

If you are interested in developing your own eText, there are several tools for constructing them and hosting them available, however PressBooks (https://pressbooks.com/faculty-authors/) is perhaps the most user friendly interface for creating and editing your own text.