This document discusses open educational resources (OER) and related topics such as intellectual property rights, copyright, and obtaining permission to use copyrighted materials. It provides guidance on finding openly licensed resources, using attribution tools, developing policies around consent and risk management, and adopting best practices for working with OERs to avoid legal issues.
2. Share and share alike: using and creating Open Educational Resources ā ā teaching materials for free? ā Suzanne Hardy and Gillian Brown Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine On behalf of Brown, Greenwood, Hardy, Purcell, Quentin-Baxter & Wood,
28. consent commons Consent Commons ameliorates uncertainty about the status of educational resources depicting people, and protects institutions from legal risk by developing robust and sophisticated policies and promoting best practice in managing information.
29. Engendering trust Consent everything-even where ownership and patient/non-patient rights appear clear, and store consent with resource ļ¾
52. ā many medical students seem unaware of or unconcerned with the possible ramifications of sharing personal information in publicly available online profiles even though such information could affect their professional lives ā Ferdig et al, 2008
53. ā most learners are still strongly led by tutors and course practices: tutor skills and confidence with technology are therefore critical to learners' development ā Beetham et al, 2009
64. The Higher Education Academy OER pages: www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/teachingandlearning/oer/ The JISC OER pages: www.jisc.ac.uk/oer The OER InfoKit from JISC InfoNet: openeducationalresources.pbworks.com The OER Synthesis and Evaluation Report: www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/oer/ The JISC Legal IPR Toolkit: www.web2rights.com/OERIPRSupport/index.html References
74. cc: by Least restrictive Most open Most reusable This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.
75.
76. Drop down gives HTML or plain text options to copy into your resource
In groups of 2 or 3 people, introduce yourself to your neighbour and consider these questions: Where do you get your resources for use in teaching? What do your students do with your resources? (keep copies?) Who owns the resources you create?
The background is a huge recent investment in the UK in Open Educational Resources. A one year project we were involved in was one of 29 in the HEFCE (www.hefce.ac.uk) funded UK OER pilot programme which ran March 2009 ā March 2010 The projects were administered by the Joint Information Systems Committee (www.jisc.ac.uk)and the Higher Education Academy (www.heacademy.ac.uk). Phase 2 of OER has recently been announced, with an extra 4 millions being committed in a climate of austerity, thus representing a significant policy movement in favour of OERs in the UK.
There is definitely an appetite for change
There is emerging evidence that 50% of staff time/resources on preparation for teaching can be saved by engaging with OER This rerent blog post sets out come compelling evidence for students using OER and that an OER approach can save time and money. The OU has also published work which indicates that student engage with OER prior to enrolling on the course, and only enrol when they know they can pass ā so OER can improve retention rates at University.
IPR is made up of Patents, Trade marks, Designs, and Copyright. This presentation focuses on Copyright as the most key IPR relating to OER. The others protect designs, functionality and appearances.
Copyright is typically split into OWNERSHIP and LICENCE. Anything which is EXPRESSED (drawn, written, documented) is automatically covered by copyright, whether the author wants it or not. Exceptions include where employees have signed over their rights to their employer. If you tell your friend about an idea that you have had in the pub, and they draw an image of it for you, then they will own the copyright.
Economic rights include the rights to financially exploit the creation, and moral rights include the right to have the author ās name attributed on copies. Authors can (explicitly) waive, assign (as if to a publisher), licence or sell the ownership of their works.
Essentially if you re-use materials which are copyright to others then this counts as an INFRINGEMENT and the copyright holder may take you to court. If you re-use something that someone else has breached the copyright of then this is secondary infringement and is just as bad as the original offence. People often download un-attributed materials from the Internet thinking that they are safe to re-use; they are not.
There are occasions when you can copy copyright works, for example, if the copyright has expired, if it constitutes āfair dealingā, the work is covered by a licence or the author has given their permission (if you have permission then always cite the author and state āused with permissionā).
To obtain permission then contact the author or their publisher (owner of the copyright).
Fair dealing does allow some rights to copy copyright works for specific purposes, however this is NOT an excuse for infringing another person ās copyright. If in doubt, use materials which are licenced or ask for permission.
A licence is simply a legal statement saying what you can and cannot do with the copyright works. Some organisations (such as the Copyright Licencing Agency) use licencing schemes (standard legal clauses) which are well recognised. This makes it easier for owners to share, for users to understand the rules of use, and for both parties to observe protocol. Creative Commons provides some well-recognised licencing schemes.
The best way to safeguard yourself and your organisation against copyright infringement is to develop appropriate policies, advertise the policy clearly, train everyone in how to implement it, and follow it. For example, if you have a policy which says that āthis material has been produced to the highest possible ethical standards and anyone with any concerns should contact xxx in writing after which the offending material will be removed within 10 working days pending investigationā. Then if someone contacts you, do what your policy says. Alternatively, you could just increase your annual insurance premiums to give you greater liability insurance in case of a breach (more on risk in a moment). Together with policies you could also use disclaimers: āthe material provided on this site has been checked according to xxx however no warranties express or impliedā¦ā
Do you know who owns copyright of the teaching resources you produce? What about your studentās work? If you share, what and how do you do it?
One of the conditions of the funding was that we release everything under CC licenses. One of the main characteristics of an Open Educational Resource, is that it has an open license attached to it. These work in addition to existing copyright, which is made up of 2 parts: ownership and licensing. The copyright part deals with ownership ā Creative Commons deals with the licensing part, making explicit to users which they can do with the resource and under what circumstances. You always retain IPR. Creative Commons is the licensing regime we were required to apply, but its not the only one. There are others. CC has a range of licenses with varying degrees of which you are allowed to do, and whether or not you can make commercial use of materials. The simplest is attritbution only, the most restrictive is attribution-noncommerical-noderivatives. There are very good reasons you may choose that license ā such as if you have material containing data which would be sensitive out of that particular context. We also had to tag everything with ukoer, and deposit materials or metadata into Jorum Open, the national repository at www.jorum.ac.uk Thinking about licensing is something we should be thinking about with all of our resources whether they are going into an open repository or not. If they are being uploaded into a VLE, or if you are distributing them by email, it is likely they are being reshared via email, social networking etc.Making the use of the material and understanding what can and can āt be done with a resource is therefore essential to all of us. CC makes it easy.
Such as ābyā attribution only (meaning that others have to acknowledge you as the original author); non-commercial to prevent others from making money out of your copyright.
What we need is something that works alongside copyright and licensing regimens to give us something to evidence or give provenance to materials which required consent under data protection law, so that onward transmission sharing and reuse becomes easier, and we can open up more healthcare materials to use as OERs. Consent is a currently a barrier to open release as legacy materials can āt evidence the consent status of clinical recordings ā so we end up with non-commerical no-derivatives licenses as a default rather than a fallback position, where we can apply them. Everyone wants to use more open licenses but needs to be able to evidence consent.
While copyright is an automatic right, data protection is better described as a set of principles. Arising from the perspective of patient consent (patient data is classed as āsensitiveā under the DPAct1998) for patient materials used in teaching, we argue for additional tools to support consent from people. When creating open educational resources copyright doesnāt quite go far enough to recognise the rights of people who are represented to be respected (whether they have copyright or not). Representation could be a photograph, voice or video recording, data set or patient story. For example, if a person has agreed for their photograph to appear in your open educational resources (they are a student, a member of staff, an actor, etc.), and they pass away, what do you do if their family asks you to take down the OER? (What you are legally required to do may be different to what you would choose to do, in principle). Therefore you are essentially operating āpoliciesā.
In our field ā healthcare education there is a third thing we should be thinking about. A human consent version of a Creative Commons licence would enable much more sophisticated recognition of the role and rights of people (whether they are the ācreatorsā or not) to be treated fairly and with respect. We need new technologies to support the implementation of Consent Commons ā such as the ability to inform users that a resource has been updated or ātaken downā. I was at a meeting yesterday which is bringing together experts to put together a set of principles and a code of practice around consent, and in our OER2 project, PORSCHE, we are working with CC UK and others to put together some ideas around a Consent Commons to complement Creative Commons ā making consent in resources.
We would like to propose a consent commons to work alongside or with creative commons as a way of demonstrating due diligence in dealing with issues of consent and using patient data sensitively in learning and teaching with specific reference to being able to share.
We feel this is something we should all be doing anyway ā in the same way we collect and store consent for treatment and research. And in the same way as we reference in publications. It should be as easy and as embedded in practice as that. Its about good practice which is easy and practical to implement. It ās about covering our backs and trying to think further down the line ā making the consent status clear for other users who may use this recording in a different way. What a consent license could do is make the patients rights clear alongside the owner ās rights.
Where do you find your materials? Do you limit your search in any way?
The best way to safeguard yourself and your organisation against copyright infringement is to develop appropriate policies, advertise the policy clearly, train everyone in how to implement it, and follow it. For example, if you have a policy which says that āthis material has been produced to the highest possible ethical standards and anyone with any concerns should contact xxx in writing after which the offending material will be removed within 10 working days pending investigationā. Then if someone contacts you, do what your policy says. Alternatively, you could just increase your annual insurance premiums to give you greater liability insurance in case of a breach (more on risk in a moment). Together with policies you could also use disclaimers: āthe material provided on this site has been checked according to xxx however no warranties express or impliedā¦ā
Just as we expect students and junior staff to model professional behaviours in real life, we need them to do the same in the digital environment.
No point in blocking social networking sites, or in discouraging natural behaviours ā students have to be students as the GMC itself points out Which presents us with somewhat of a dichotomy
Managing risk and encouraging good practice Plagiarism well understood Refencing and citation = but that what about acknowledging sources in teaching materials? Where did that image com from? Whose is it? What are the barriers to adopting good practice in learning and teaching? And who is responsible for ensuring we do the best we can?
On the website you can find reports, the toolkit ā version 3 will be significantly better in terms of the single interface, and available in November 2010. You can find information about OER2, PORSCHE and ACTOR projects, and find an increasing number of case studies ā about 10 so far, though we have done about 60. Do get in touch with us and follow us on Twitterā¦..
Thanks for listeningā¦.. NOTES Chair of TEL strategy development group at DH is Dr Stuart Charney ā elearning simulation and other tel systems. National eLearning Portal Kate Lomax: www.elearning.nhs.uk Forthcoming workshops on copyright and elearning ā nb contact kate and see if collaboration useful Is the search on the readiness toolkit available to build services on top of? E.g does it have RSS? Elearning developers network ā consent commons? CoP. Resources loads of useful stuff there. NLMS Jo Sidebottom
Is this useful? Will you use these tricks? You can filter all Google content by usage rights