I have decided to enrol in the Copyright for Educators course to broaden my knowledge of Copyright particularly in a legal and educational context.
I am hoping it will guide me in teaching academic integrity to students, particularly as a student may not be aware that they are breaching copyright.
I have been interested so far with the overview of copyright and who owns material.
Several weeks in, I have been amazed at the regulations associated with using material for educational purposes. I have to admit that are all guilty of some sort of copyright breach on a regular basis, and most of it, we wouldn't even notice.
So were actually running the risk of being caught.
I remember a few years ago, a colleague at one school told me that the school claims ownership of any resources that the individual teachers might have created for classroom use. I thought it was bizzare, but that school under the law was in fact correct. They are the owner of the resource, not me. If I use a resource at another school, under the law I cannot use it because the resource is the property of the school.
And I recall one colleague embedding watermarks on their sheets to claim ownership, well the school owns them under the law, not the teacher. They would have to create the resource at home and publish it through a publisher to claim any ownership.
Copyright is a complex topic, but it will certainly inform me on how to advise teachers as to what has to be applied in terms of copyright in the classroom.
