LEARNING MATERIALS EXCHANGE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY OF ATTITUDES, POLICIES AND LICENSES

In this poster we analyze the issues related to the exchange of teaching and learning digital materials in the context of an ¨Information skills¨ course at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), and we propose as a solution a theoretical scenario of free licenses.
This Information Skills' course is taught collaboratively by Library Information Science (LIS) teachers and academic librarians in every new EHEA Undergraduate program at UC3M. Comprising over a hundred groups and more than forty teachers, it has gone to great lengths to maximize resources. However, LIS department teachers and the academic librarians have demonstrated significantly different patterns of sharing and exchange of materials. Librarians' sharing could be considered a successful experience, as a complete and well organized collection of materials for every single course was uploaded regularly by training librarians. On the other hand faculty members' sharing was poor and disorganized.
In order to analyze the factors affecting the exchange of learning resources within this course, we carried out several research tasks including: the review of literature; an on-line survey concerning teachers' practices, approach and position with regard to resource sharing; several non-structured interviews with members of the faculty and librarians; and a quantitative analysis of the materials shared through the platform implemented for supporting this course, by contributor, type of content and some other indicators. Furthermore, we analyzed the rights licenses and policies at UC3M, and the possible existing digital rights licenses that could be applied in order to foster the sharing and reuse of Information skills' course content.
Preliminary results of our research allow us to state that the main reasons for these two different exchange patterns are related to socio-cultural and copyright issues, instead of the technical ones. Teachers and librarians' communities revealed different cultures of sharing: faculty members have a strong tradition of non-publishing, local and limited exchange and own-control of their materials; while librarians, as beginners who find themselves teaching in regular university courses, represent a more open and collaborative culture of content creation and exchange, assuming that their materials are not their property but a contribution made to the institution they work for.
As for the copyright issues, the key problem is that most universities, such as UC3M, have no clear policies addressing "intellectual property" of learning materials, therefore arousing significant faculties' concerns regarding their rights in both their roles of authors and users of learning resources. This lack of legal guarantees through licensing is thought to be one of the main causes of this low rate of sharing of learning materials among the faculty and a legal confusion about their use.
The necessary balance between University interests and authors’ intellectual rights does not seem to have an easy solution. Nevertheless, a theoretical scenario of free licenses use in UC3M institutional policies is being studied as a possible solution. The aim is that this scenario could be extrapolated for any university dealing with the complexities of learning materials exchange.