Course will teaches the basics of copyright laws, fair use guidelines, and ADA compliance regulations relevant to the design process. We investigated the idea of intellectual property as it applies to businesses and organizations. The goal was to provide a practical framework for analyzing copyright issues when encountered in professional work. This course used real life examples to prepare us for systematic analysis of copyright problems in course design. This course is intentionally a step toward bridging the gulf that is often perceived between desirable educational practice and legal permissible activities.
Entering this course, I expected self-motivation to be difficult because I thought anything related to the law is boring. I surprised myself when I worked my new understanding into conversations with friends, family, and coworkers. Initially, I believed that intellectual property rights were about the rights holder exclusively. I grew to understand that our laws were created to encourage creativity for the benefit of all. The case studies we read provided thought-provoking conversations. The concept of fair use originally brought fear, then empowerment as we explored how to ensure creators received credit for their work.
In our final weeks, we applied skills and knowledge from the 5000 course as we developed modules teaching the new facts and concepts we discovered during the first half of the class.
The cohort was tasked to generate individualized guiding documents based on research.
We applied the content from the course to the skills learned in IDT 5000 to form a course.