3b: Copyright

Guidelines

"Statements here should show how relevant legislation has influenced your work. You are not expected to have expert knowledge of all of these areas, but are expected to be aware of how they relate to your current practice."

Copyright legislation in a HE context

The UK Government copyright website states that copyright protects an author’s work by preventing others from reproducing, distributing or adapting work, or from putting it on a website. However, there is an exception to copyright for teaching purposes, which allows use of copyrighted materials if that use is ‘fair dealing’.

Copyright guidance from the UoY library defines fair dealing as the use of a reasonable amount of material that is directly relevant to instruction, fully referenced, limited in terms of audience and time availability and does not impact sales of the original material. The UoY Copyright Adviser specified a ‘reasonable amount’ of material as being 10% or one chapter of a resource in a given module.

Implications for my LT practice

As a module designer, copyright legislation has a large impact on my practice. In language and academic skills teaching, some courses use a textbook that is purchased by all students, but I’ve found that for more specialised courses there isn’t a textbook that is suitable. For courses like this I’ve needed to create my own materials, but it’s not always practical (or even possible) to create materials from scratch - I can’t create my own lecture videos, for example. I therefore often need to use third-party materials; a textbook activity, a textbook activity, online article or video, for example. As I am not the owner of these materials, it’s important to comply with copyright legislation in order to treat the author(s) fairly.

How I comply with legislation

Here are three situations which demonstrate my consideration of copyright in module and materials design.

Providing online access to textbook video content

I selected Keynote Intermediate from National Geographic Learning as the textbook for the IPC module Language and Study Skills 1. Copies were purchased for staff and students, so the use of this book complied with copyright legislation. However, there were some copyright considerations regarding students’ use of the listening material in their independent study. Each textbook comes with a DVD of the adapted TED talks used as listening material, but most students don’t have access to a DVD drive. The videos are available on an accompanying website, but this requires students to set up an account with a third party site so there could be data protection issues. I was concerned that these barriers would mean that students don’t do any independent listening practice (which they desperately need), so needed to find a way to provide the listening material in an easily accessible way online, while also complying with copyright.

Ted Talk video embedded in VLE site

For full image see 3b_Embedded Ted Talk

One possibility would be to host the videos from the DVD on the module VLE site. However, the UoY Copyright Adviser said that this wasn’t permissible as this could potentially undermine the publisher’s market. My solution was to embed the original TED Talks from ted.com on the VLE. This is permissible under TED Talks’ Creative Commons licence (Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives), if TED are clearly identified as the author, and videos are embedded using TED Talks’ own media player. The TED Talks Usage Policy also specifically encourages their use for education purposes. While the full videos are slightly different to the adapted version in the textbook, I felt this was a good compromise.

Evidence:

3b_Copyright of videos enquiry (full text of email to Copyright Adviser)
3b_Embedded Ted Talk

Using a range of materials to create a Foundation STEM-focused module

At the IPC, I developed a new STEM-focused academic skills module for Foundation students for the 2018-19 academic year. This is a specialised course, so I wasn’t able to find a single textbook that would be appropriate to use for the whole module. Instead, I needed to develop the syllabus using a range of resources. Here are some measures I took to ensure compliance with copyright legislation:

Create our own materials: this is the easiest way to comply with copyright, as we are the authors of the materials

Track use of textbook materials: to limit use of copyrighted material to a ‘reasonable amount’, I set up a spreadsheet to track which pages have been used, and then used a pivot table to work this out as the percentage of each book. This helped me make sure that less than 10% of any book was used in the course. The IPC owns at least one copy of these textbooks, and a number are also owned by the UoY Library. While this use is permissible, in the future I’d like to reduce my reliance on textbooks by creating more of my own resources and using more open educational resources.

Request digitisation by the Library: The UoY can digitise book extracts if the UoY owns a copy of the book, or if a copyright fee can be paid to the British Library. The library could digitise around 50% of the materials for these modules. These are covered by copyright exception s32, not the usual CLA HE Licence, which limited their use to the module VLE site, but this fulfilled the course needs.

fully reference all textbook material used on the VLE: acknowledgment is a requirement of the copyright exception for educational purposes.

use open educational resources (e.g., Khan Academy, TED Talks): these can be used under Creative Commons licences without express permission (see below).

Evidence:

3b_Self-created VLE Learning Module
3b_Track textbook pages
3b_Digitising textbook extracts (email from the Library Reading Lists team regarding the progress of digitisation)
3b_VLE reference List (reference list for a Learning Module task)
3b_List of textbook references (references for common sources so tutors can reference them easily)

Open Educational Resources

According to OER Commons, open education resources (OER) are “teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost, and without needing to ask permission”. I’m interpreting this as any materials which can be used for educational purposes, even if that isn’t its primary purpose.

Many OER materials are covered by a Creative Commons license, which specifies the use of materials in terms of:

if the author needs to be attributed (Attribution, BY)
the licence of any materials that you share which are based on the original (ShareAlike, SA)
if the materials can be used for commercial purposes (NonCommercial, NC)
if the materials can be adapted (NoDerivatives, ND)

The Creative Commons license means that you don’t need to request permission to use the materials, as long as use complies with the specified license.

Here’s a summary of the way that I have used OERs under the Creative Commons licensing:

CC BY-ND icon

CC BY-NC-SA icon

CC BY-NC-ND icon

TED Talks (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives): embed videos using the TED Talk media player, with no adaptation. TED Talks usage policy
Khan Academy (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike): embed videos from YouTube and provide links to Khan Academy lesson pages. Videos are usually used for note-taking practice, and I often write some questions about the content for students to answer afterwards. Khan Academy usage policy

The Conversation (Attribution-NoDerivatives): include extracts from articles with author and The Conversation attribution, provide a link to full text. The Conversation usage policy
Unsplash (No copyright, very similar to the Universal CC licence): use stock photos when images are needed. Although not required, I always try to embed the credit badge on the VLE to acknowledge the photographer. Unsplash usage policy

In the future, I’d really like to get more involved with the OER community. In particular, I hope to explore the OER Commons site a lot more, and try out their tool to create and share resources. Open access to materials really fits with my philosophy that teaching and learning should be collaborative, but does also raise issues regarding intellectual property, as my work belongs to the university, not myself. These considerations would make sharing resources within the university easier though, so there’s a benefit. The next stage is to investigate the UoY policy on sharing resources, and also to learn more about the Creative Commons licenses.

Evidence:

3b_Embedded Ted Talk
1b_Task with embedded video (Khan Academy video)
2b_Independent learning task (image from Unsplash, credit badge at the bottom)

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