Hopefully, by mid-semester, your students have already gotten access to most assigned reading materials. As always the Copyright Librarian can help with getting things online - linking to Learning Commons’ licensed resources, finding ebooks where available, and much more.
If you want to share additional materials with students as you revise instructional plans, or if you want students to share more resources with each other in an online discussion board, keep in mind some simple guidelines below.
It's always easiest to link!
Linking to publicly available online content like news websites, existing online videos, etc. is rarely a copyright issue (Better not to link to existing content that looks obviously infringing - Joe Schmoe's YouTube video of the entire "Avengers: Endgame" movie is probably not a good thing to link to). But linking to most YouTube videos, especially ones that allow sharing and embedding, should be fine. Linking to subscription content through the NWP Learning Commons is also a great option. Much of the learning commons licensed content will have DOIs, PURLs, or other "permalink" or "persistent link" options, all of which should work even for off-campus users. Contact the Copyright Librarian directly for assistance.
Sharing copies and scanning
Making copies of new materials for students (by downloading and uploading files, or by scanning from physical documents) can present some copyright issues, but they're not different from those involved in deciding whether to share something online with your students when you are meeting in-person.
NWP faculty and instructors are encouraged to read and apply the documents Fair Dealing Guidelines and Determining Fair Dealing when making decisions about making and providing copies for students to post to D2L. The Copyright Librarian is available to help faculty understand the relevant issues.
Genius Scan, Adobe Scan are app tools that you can use to easily digitize fair dealing amounts of material from your phone to post to D2L. Please keep in mind that you can make any scanned PDF files more accessible for your students by using an online optical character recognition (OCR) online tool that can be used to convert "non-selectable" text files into machine-readable or recognized text. NWP Learning Commons also has an appropriate scanner and appropriate software.
When an instructor needs to make more copyrighted material available to students than the Fair Dealing Guidelines allows, the Copyright Librarian can assist faculty in making these determinations and can also help you seek formal copyright permissions to provide copies to students – but there may be some issues with getting permissions on short timelines.
If you require digital copies of physical reserve materials, contact the Copyright Librarian. Please note, however, that even in this environment it will be difficult to obtain permission to scan and post entire books, particularly required textbooks. Instead, try to identify critical selections from these works that you would like to use.
An alternative way to find course materials is to a look online for free to use teaching resources like Open Educational Resources. Just remember to attribute!
You can also search our catalogue which has a large collection of journals and many ebooks that can support on-line learning. Your Librarians can also help!!
Attribution
This resource is adapted for NWP from material provided by the University of Calgary and their Copyright Office, University of Minnesota document Copyright Services, Rapidly shifting your course from in-person to online. Unless otherwise noted, all content on the Copyright Information section of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. We would like to acknowledge some contribution of adaptation language from University of Toronto Scholarly Communications & Copyright Office and Ryerson University Library.