[NEEDS SERIOUS UPDATE]

Unintended Consequences [intro to use of ARR materials, fair use, and OER]

Imagine the following scenario:

A first-time instructor of a composition course needs to create a writing assignment for a rhetorical analysis essay. He searches the internet and locates a MS Word document that another instructor has published to a department website. The wording on the assignment is pretty much what the rookie instructor wants, so he downloads the document and only changes a few things here and there. He then adds his own rubric. Just to be safe, he adds an attribution tag in the document’s footer, including the name of the original author, the URL, and the words “adapted from.”

Well, maybe nobody will ever find out, but this might be a violation of the author’s intellectual property rights.

<Sigh.>

To the great displeasure of most educators, no meaningful discussion of copyright and fair use is possible without being inundated by complex if- and when-clauses. A question may be phrased as yes/no, but far more than one word is usually necessary as an answer:

Q: “Can I photocopy a chapter of a copyrighted book and give it to my students?”

A: “Yes, if you do it only once or twice, had no other choice and it was timely, it won’t impact the profitability of the work, and it’s not the book’s central content. Be prepared to defend yourself from an intellectual property lawsuit leveled against the institution.”

And this is the kind of answer that makes a lot of educators HATE talking about copyright and fair use. It can be a headache.

Some questions, however, can be definitively answered:

Q: “Can I scan a chapter of an ‘all rights reserved’ textbook and post the .pdf to my faculty webpage for my students to access?”

A: “No.”

Done. That’s that. Correction: You “can” do that, you just can’t do it lawfully. Perhaps “should” would have been better in place of “can,” but we think the point is made. (Nota bene: No need for physician to heal thyself if point is made?)

Anyway, we’ve likely all engaged in a discussion of fair use at some point, and some of us might even think we get it. That’s great, but, when it comes to using, developing, and sharing open educational resources, we have to think differently because open licenses work with existing copyright law to permit sharing and adaptation.

So what can we do? This chapter is not about what you can and can’t use in the classroom. This module isn’t even about what you can and can’t use online. This is about what you have to keep in mind when using and developing openly-licensed materials.

What Isn’t OER

So, like, obviously, the first place to start is your preferred search engine.  We’re not sure that this needs a walkthrough, but here we go anyway.  If you just open up a new tab in your browser (or, if that doesn’t make sense, just click the internet button again), and do a search for “OER,” chances are that you’ll find OER Commons (Links to an external site.) among the first few hits.  If it doesn’t show up, what search engine are you using, anyway?  Whatever.  The link is above.  Or here (Links to an external site.), if “above” is too ambiguous (which it might be, and no offense intended).

There are any number of other sites that you can visit to access OER (consult the “Recommended Additional Resources” page for some links), and for specific disciplines and courses you may find all kinds of helpful options.  Those blessed with composition and rhetoric courses, however, may find that while k-12 English may be ready for the revolution, college-level first-year composition is fatally behind the times.

“But when I google ‘thesis statement exercises,’ I get lots of results!” some may cry.  True, many resources of varying quality appear as if from nowhere, but can we use them?

Byte: The availability of something online, though ostensibly (and perhaps truly) intended for open use, does not necessarily make the resource legitimately open for use.

<Insert frustrated curses here.>

As we’ll find in the next module, a digital resource must be explicitly licensed for use; otherwise, even if the author intended for free access and modification, anyone doing so would be violating copyright.  Yikes, right?

What Is OER

But before we navigate those waters, let’s identify some of the most common open resources for education.  There are a number of open-resource collections online, providing access to countless free, modifiable materials, ranging from syllabi and handouts and small group activities to whole textbooks and even entire courses.  These collections are easy to locate online with a basic search, but a (nowhere near comprehensive) list of this is available later at Recommended Additional Resources.  For those seeking information, there are also wikis, which are aggregations of user-generated content.  The most obvious example is Wikipedia (Links to an external site.), of course, but for education and the open resource movement, Wikieducator (Links to an external site.) is a great place to start.  Another kind of free resource that is especially nice for those of us in the field of English composition, rhetoric, or literature, are libraries of public domain works, such as Project Gutenberg (Links to an external site.) or Wikisource (Links to an external site.).  Finally, there are MOOCs.  This unfortunate acronym (please do not confuse with “mook“), stands for “Massive Open Online Course.”  You should already know a little about these puppies, since you’re taking one right now.  Some institutions have begun to publish a number of courses online that are freely accessible, though not necessarily “open” because they require the purchase of a textbook.  No credit is awarded for successful completion of these courses for students not enrolled in the university, but learning is still possible and some institutions are experimenting with ways to offer some sort of certification that the course had been completed (Links to an external site.).

Pretty much whatever you might need as an educator may be available online with a sufficient sharing license, whether you are well-seasoned and just looking for something a little better in terms of a handout about commas or an adjunct professor teaching your first composition course in need of some examples of how to structure your course.  You just need to know where to look.

First, though, we have to test our ability to distinguish between stuff you can look at online and stuff that you can comfortably use for yourself.