Being alert of copyright issues in an on-line environment

E-learning is nowadays found in various areas of education, where learning materials can be put online so staff and students can have some online learning environment experience. Teachers use library resources that they find useful for teaching in an online environment. Teachers are not doing anything more than they would in the traditional form of teaching where they hand students lesson notes and activity sheets, but this time they are doing so in an ‘innovative learning environment’. The difference is that they are having a ‘content repository on-line’ where they upload presentations, video files, music files, readings etc. into a VLE; thus lacking the interactive environment element where students contribute also to such content and not just access this content.

Unfortunately, teachers may not be aware of the licensing that school libraries have for e-journals and e-books and they would upload full text materials that are copyrighted. They apt to upload and give direct links of many on-line subscribed resource to students to enhance the learning material, without realizing that these lead to copyright issues. They might argue that by giving students the chance to download material, scanned copies from copies from books; they are aiding students in their studies. But this would infringe others’ copyright.

It is likely to be much more difficult for students to understand that some resources cannot be made available to them freely just so easy. Thus, I think that teachers must inform and make students aware of such copyright issues, not just in the traditional mode of teaching or in an on-line environment as discussed above; but also in everyday life where lots of them download gigs of movies and mp3s. We must alert them!!

References:
Secker, J. (2010). E-learning and copyright: background. In Copyright and E-learning- A guide for practitioners (Chapter 1). Retrieved from http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/downloads/file/secker1.pdf