4. The work I want to use in my online class is both copyrighted and free of any license. Are there any specific provisions of the copyright law that apply to online classroom use?
Yes, Section 110(2) of the copyright law (otherwise known as the “TEACH Act”) specifically applies to displaying images, playing motion pictures or sound recordings, or performing works in your online class. Since this section applies to any “transmissions” of performances or displays, cable television classes would also be included here.
There are a number of institutional and faculty member obligations that must be fulfilled in order to use the TEACH Act. Consult your library or university counsel on whether and how the TEACH Act is implemented locally. If your university cannot or does not wish to comply with TEACH Act obligations, consider whether what you have in mind for your online course is a fair use. (See question #5, below.)
If you wish to explore the TEACH Act option, read on for a description of a faculty member’s obligations.
Generally, to perform or display a work in your online class the work must be
used under your supervision
as part of the class session
as part of systematic mediated instructional activities (see 4j, below)
directly and materially related to the teaching content
The work must be lawfully made and not excerpted from a product that was specifically designed and marketed for use in an online course.
Furthermore, there are three additional requirements:
You must password protect or otherwise restrict access to your online class Web site to enrolled students, and
You must reasonably prevent your students from being able to save or print the work, i.e., control the “downstream” uses, and
You must include a general copyright warning on your class Web site.
Jenny Darrow on 30 Oct 12There are several widely-accepted rubrics (Quality Matters, the ION one in Illinois, etc.), but in my opinion, they focus on course design, not on teaching the course. When I was at Black Hawk College, we created a Best Practices for Exemplary Online Teaching set of standards based on the Chickering and Gamson's "7 Principles of Good Practice for Undergraduate Education" meta-analysis. Individual best practices for online teaching were pulled from the literature and listed as possibilities under each of the 7 principles, and an 8th was added with some of the course design elements not already mentioned in the first 7. In other words, we created a local document that could assist faculty in doing self-assessment, peer evaluations of each other's courses, and potentially institutional review of online courses. However, our instrument was not used for institutional assessment because it was not approved as part of the faculty [union] contract. It is important for a document like this to be shared with the faculty ahead of time so that they know how their courses are going to be evaluated. I also think it is helpful to have several people evaluate various aspects of online courses, such as someone who is an expert in online education who can evaluate the learning experiences and course design elements of the course, someone from the faculty member's department who can evaluate the quality and accuracy of the course content, as well as the administrator whose job it is to evaluate teaching. If the institution uses a type of rubric or assessment document when evaluating face-to-face teaching, it needs to be vetted by online experts to determine if it emphasizes appropriate, comparable variables in the online environment. For example, if activities to promote student engagement is on that form...what does that look like online? Not all administrators or faculty who have not taught online would know what to look for as indicators of student engagement.
