Abstract:

Learning management systems (LMS) are commonly used in many universities. Teachers develop many courses in these pedagogical environment. Ten years ago, these online courses where widely open, to encourage teachers and students to make the move. But today, teachers tend to diffuse anything anyway and due to wide capabilities of search engines, this may rise legal problems. In this communication, we explain how we dealded with these worrying questions in our institution. Our LMS administrators team worked with lawyers to propose terms of use and privacy policy for our LMS. We also create a section for legal issues in our online manual.
We illustrate some of the legal questions using concrete live case studies that raises in online courses. In particular, we explain how to transpose the fair use citation exception for education in an LMS. We also make some recommandation for teachers to avoid plagiarism of their own productions. We discuss the good gestion of students private datas, such as emails, phone numbers and especially grades. We finally present the precautions to take when diffusing people photos or videos, or possibilities you have to preserve diffusion of images of yourself.
This communication gives a summary of the main legal information to remind to all LMS user. It refers to belgian laws and is enlarged to european legislation. Strategies may be used and transferred to other regions.

Keywords:

e-learning, LMS, copyright, privacy, plagiarism, fair trade, right of publicity, legal issues.