Copyright

Published language teaching materials are covered by the Copyright Licensing Agency; however, rapid advances in educational technology have created a number of grey areas in copyright compliance. On the one hand, technology allows us to refine the way in which teaching material is presented to students, but this can also raise questions over the extent to which intellectual property rights are being observed. Unsurprisingly, the shift to online teaching in light of lockdown has made the issues surrounding online material and copyright more complex; although, like so many other things about the move online, the questions have been there all along and it is worthwhile looking at them in more detail in order to better inform future decisions around teaching and course/materials development.

According to the University's overview of copyright legislation for teachers, we can reproduce an extract from a copyright work, including teaching materials, for the purposes of giving or receiving instruction, but with the caveat that the content is:

• relevant to the topic under discussion (not merely decorative);

• fully attributed;

• a 'reasonable' amount;

• for a limited audience (not published on the open web);

• for a limited time;

• with no impact on the rights-holder's market.

I have adapted my own teaching and design practice to comply with the above by writing my own material wherever possible instead of using or adapting existing published language instruction tasks and resources. Where a published and copyrighted work exists that is well-written and useful, I try to reverse engineer the tasks and retain the structure and intended learning outcomes while coming up with new language, scenarios and explanations of my own. An example of this is an activity I designed for a writing class on using cohesive devices to transition smoothly between paragraphs. The page in question uses the idea of a gap fill for transition words and phrases that has appeared in other published sources, but with a new text written by me and some adaptations to the structure sufficient to make it compliant with copyright.

In language teaching, the use of authentic spoken and written texts is a vital part of instruction, and so third party sources will need to be incorporated in order to teach 'real' language. However, by linking to or embedding searchable online media with full attribution, I can utilise such texts without impacting the income of the rights holder. Below is an example of a more difficult challenge I experienced where technology and legislation converge, and how my design of a particular lesson changed as a result.

Problem: to what extent can we recreate the physical classroom online?

A key resource that the was used on the listening strand of the language and Study Skills module before the move online was a text-book by Campbell and Smith (2012) from the English for Academic Study series published by Garnet Education. This was a paper-based resources which focussed on what's known as the 'micro-skills' aspect of listening proficiency. That is, the development of the ability to understand spoken English at a very local level by looking at items such as sentence stress patterns, phonetics, word boundaries, which revolve around close analysis of a very short section of text.

While online teaching made working with a physical text book almost impossible in live-session teaching, the materials from the Garnet EAS books lent themselves very well to flipped learning objects on Xerte (see for example a lesson on Digressions, and one on Note Taking). The short audio files and use of transcripts along with comprehension checking questions that had clear right and wrong answers were perfect for independent study, and made even more so by Xerte's range of interactive tasks and ability to provide instant feedback to users. Thus, with the help of learning technology, our normal classroom based materials have been transformed into engaging flipped learning activities. However, while learning technology has allowed me to not only replicate but actively enhance learning provision, there are some copyright restrictions that need to be borne in mind.

The digital versions of the materials had to be adapted in terms of the lengths of the excerpts used in order to make sure they did not exceed the 10% permitted, and full attributions were added to the introduction pages. I also needed to change the way I oversaw the module by making sure that the URL was not kept open indefinitely and thus be searchable on the web. Instead I adjusted the permissions so that the materials would only be accessible for limited periods of time, and communicated the time window of availability to students and the teaching team. The examples above have been temporarily made available for the purposes of demonstration for this portfolio.