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Faculty Essentials
Introduction
Understanding the basics about copyright are important for faculty developing OpenCourseWare materials. Concepts such as "Fair Use" and the TEACH Act allow some use of materials for educational purposes that would not otherwise be allowable. HOWEVER: Placing materials in an open access format such as OpenCourseWare often means that those allowances are no longer applicable. The only materials that can be published in OpenCourseWare are materials that "belong" to consenting faculty or the institution, or are clearly licensed for reuse.
FAQs :: Use Open Materials :: Provide Attribution :: Reusability :: Faculty Release
FAQs about Copyright
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What can be protected by copyright?
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“Works of authorship that can be perceived, reproduced, or communicated directly or by machine” |
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What cannot be protected by copyright? |
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Who gets copyright protection? |
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What rights does copyright owner have? |
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derived from MIT's IP Overview
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Use Open Materials
Using open materials to build new courses saves everyone a lot of trouble. Open materials include anything in the Public Domain or information that has been licensed for open use. The trick is finding materials where the licensing of the materials is exposed so that you can see if you can reuse them. There are a few places online that make that easy to do.
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License Requirements |
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Lecture notes, syllabi, video, audio, and other course materials
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Attribution and share-alike are required, non-commercial reuse is permitted
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collection of open education repositories and communities
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Each repository/community has license requirements to follow.
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images
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A variety of creative commons licenses
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images
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Attribution required. Other requirements.
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images, text, audio, video, course materials, archived web pages, and more
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Objects are licensed separately
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educational materials primarily for K-12 educators
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Objects are licensed separately
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free online books
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Public domain
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links to online resources for higher education
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Objects are licensed separately. See terms for reuse.
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free encyclopedia
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free text books
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free library
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a collection of media
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Objects are licensed separately
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Provide Attribution
When using freely available materials, provide attribution. Cite the creator of the materials to avoid appearing to take credit for the work of others (WAV).
Reusability of OCW Materials
OpenCourseWare materials are meant to be reused. Build them so that it's easy for people to do that. Two things to consider when designing OpenCourseWare materials are granularity and context. Generally speaking, materials with a smaller granularity are more easily reusable. However, a collection of small pieces is just that-a collection of pieces-not instruction. Wiley (2004) called this the reusability paradox (PDF) (HTML).
The more context a learning object has, the more (and the more easily) a learner can learn from it... To make learning objects maximally reusable, learning objects should contain as little context as possible. -David Wiley
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The Reusability Paradox |
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The inverse relationship between reusability and pedagogical effectiveness.
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Like other pedagogical dilemmas, there is not a simple solution to the reusability paradox. The trick is to design materials that are granular enough to be reused without compromising pedagogical effectiveness. One way to do that is to provide context around granular, reusable pieces of content. Sumner, Dawe and Devaul (2002) discussed the problem in greater depth (PDF). Doorten, Giesbers, Janssen, Daniels and Koper (2003) from the Open University of the Netherlands wrote about how to transform existing content into reusable objects. (PDF)
Faculty Release Document
In this document (PDF) (DOC) faculty members grant the institution the rights to publish their content. This document does not transfer copyright ownership to the institution. It allows the institution the rights to publish the content.
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Grants the OCW institution the right to publish the course contents. |
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Acknowledges that the materials will be re-used by lots of people. |
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The faculty member ensures that the materials published are accurate. |
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Users will be required to provide attribution to the faculty member. |
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The faculty member still holds the copyright. |
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The faculty member asserts that s/he either holds the rights or has permission to publish materials included in the course. |
