Abstract:

Present day technology makes it possible for educational material prepared by teachers to go beyond the environs of professors’ offices, computers and personal archives, and be shared online with other members of the educational community. Yet there is an overall need to be aware of the legal implications thereof. Online teaching resources must fulfil copyright legislation, on the one hand, and be protected by it on the other hand. Given that teachers can be both producers and consumers of e-learning contents, we should have a clear notion of what others might reasonably allow us to do with the product of their work, and to what extent we will permit others to take advantage of the products we elaborate.

Precisely because of such broad development of digital information and the Internet, the copyright laws of most countries have been undergoing modifications in recent years. As is usually the case, legislation tends to run behind technological reality, so that even the newly introduced changes do not respond adequately to the needs of the digital environment. This lack of fit between legislation and reality is not only due to the logical delays in the lawmaking process, but also to strong resistance to change on the part of the copyright industry. Indeed, copyright holders and their lobbyists, characterised by a largely pre-digital frame of mind, have managed to girdle legislative reform. In short, the present laws regarding copyright are of little use in the context of digital education, and can even be a real obstacle for the development of e-learning activities. Given this scenario, what attitude should teachers adopt? Is it better to comply with the law to the “t”, even at the expense of educational goals, or bypass it in certain cases for the sake of learning and teaching?

Aside from the changes in legislation, and in part due to their inadequacy, certain international movements have come to advocate that we revise the present copyright system. These are generically known as “copyleft”. Of particular interest for university teaching is the urge for more flexible licenses, and more specifically the ones known as “creative commons”. This model of license was first used successfully in the areas of musical and audiovisual production, and later extended to scientific and educational realms; results prove quite satisfactory, for example, in the case of MIT´s Open CourseWare initiative. Still, for professors to make the most of such licenses in view of their teaching activities, they need to have some basic knowledge of what they consist of, how they work, where each type can be applied, how they can help us share our work, and to what extent we can use the work of others.

We focused this research effort on determining the attitudes of digital teachers as they face copyright-related problems, and their capacity to take advantage of the copyleft type of license. To this end, we issued an online questionnaire to the professors of online subjects at the University of Granada. Here we provide an analysis of the results of our survey, and the conclusions deriving from it. Our findings underline an urgent need to provide teachers with the background necessary to cope with problems arising from current copyright legislation, and take advantage of the opportunities stemming from new licensing models.

Keywords:

Copyrght, e-learning, information literacy.