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'Type' by Victoria Pickering is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
When it comes to publishing online – on NILE, MyPad or other websites – copyright legislation is an important consideration that can too often be overlooked.
Arbitrarily using text, images, audio or video from other websites in your work runs risk. It’s not great to use NILE’s password protection, or ‘it’s for educational use’ as legitimate excuses.
So to help you produce trouble-free online content we’ve put together a quick guide to what you can and cannot do, and good places to find great resources.
Copyright Basics
To help ease you into this complex world, the Copyright Hub has an interactive guide with a vast wealth of resources.
It’s worth remembering Copyright sits alongside Trademarks and Patents and Designs and is overseen by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO).
This is not to be confused with Data Protection and Freedom of Information which fall under the remit of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)
Copyright exists to protect work and permit its owner to dictate how, where and when this is used. It doesn’t always prevent republishing, but will dictate the terms of use.
Creative Commons
A common way to find and use material online, legally and for free, is by using Creative Commons content. Where applied, a copyright owner will permit the use of their work in the following ways:
- attribution only, with no further restrictions,
- no commercial uses of the work,
- no derivatives (adaptations) can made of it.
You may have already considered using this when posting your own copyright material on the web.
Websites
Information which is freely available on the internet isn’t necessarily free to copy. Websites are protected by copyright and some sites may also be considered as databases and be protected by database right.
The material published on a website is protected by copyright in the same way as print material. Most will have a copyright declaration or specify how material from the site may be used. Although if missing, it’s best to assume the usual restrictions apply and only use a small amount for private, non-commercial purposes.
If the information on the website is not easy to access – it’s password protected for instance – then this implies the owner is protecting their work and does not want it to be copied or distributed freely; even if there is no charge for using the site.
Not all the information on the internet has been posted legally, so be careful to check the source of the information where it is possible, and use your own judgement where it is not.
Images
When looking for images it’s tempting to use anything that’s readily available! Jisc’s interactive guide gives you a safer approach.
It’s better to use a search engine that displays only Creative Commons licensed images, or those that have been made available rights free.
- Creative Commons search
- Flickr (advanced search)
- Everystockphoto
- MorgueFile
- Open Clipart
- Xpert
- Canva
If you use Google Images, narrow the usage rights with an advance search. For further advice read Jisc Digital Media – Copyright of still images.
TV, Radio & Sounds
There’s a wealth of videos on sites such as YouTube which you may wish to use in your teaching. Although be mindful it’s not legal to download a video to upload it to your NILE site, or redistribute it in any way. However, it is legal and straightforward to add a link or embed the video in NILE.
The Educational Recording Agency (ERA) licence permits staff to copy, access and use broadcast output for non-commercial educational purposes. This means all scheduled free-to-air radio and television broadcasts may be recorded for the purposes of making ERA Recordings.
To save you the trouble of having to record programmes yourself, as well as providing guidance, the British Universities Film and Video Council also runs the Box Of Broadcasts (BOB) service, to which the University subscribes.
This makes available programmes from over 60 UK channels dating back to 2007 and can to be used in your teaching. What’s more, clips can easily be embedded into NILE.
For further advice read Jisc Digital Media – AudioVisual copyright
Books, Journals and Newspapers
All the electronic resources provided through NELSON are covered by licences. Most e-journal and e-book suppliers prefer their material to be deep-linked within NILE. Guidance on this is available in the downloads section of the Library webpage on the staff portal.
The same licences allow users to make single copies for educational purposes, so you could refer students to a reference or deep-link in these cases. Be suspicious if you find online copies of books or journals you would normally expect to pay for. They could easily be illegal copies.
The University’s CLA licence also allows digital scanned copies of both book chapters and journal articles to be placed into NILE legally (whether we own them already or not). Contact the Digitisation Team for help.
Open Educational Resources
Many institutions from around the world have made available Open Educational Resources (OERs). These are teaching materials including lesson plans, documents and media available for reuse.
It can be time consuming to adapt and localise materials created in other countries, so we recommend you use UK repositories in the first instance, where possible.
To sample websites that offer complete free open courses, have a browse around MIT OpenCourseWare and Saylor courses as examples.
Open Textbooks are available from BCCampus in Canada and a good selection of links are listed on Open Access Textbooks. These are free, open, reusable textbooks in HE and FE.
OMICS provides a list of open access journals in different languages and subjects. The OER Knowledge Cloud also offers many research reports and articles about OER.
And finally – did you know?
- Copyright does not need to be registered and subsists automatically from the moment an original work is created.
- Owning a piece of work, and owning the copyright of that work, are not the same thing.
- Commissioning work by a third-party doesn’t grant you copyright ownership – unless it’s stated in the contractual terms.
There were significant changes to copyright in 2014. Here are some links to explain further.
We have heard of some synchronisation issues with the Turnitin iPad app, particularly when large numbers of (or very large) student submissions are being handled. Joe Mills of LEAP at Hull helpfully identified that the problem can arise when an iPad ‘sleeps’ during synchronisation – this will prevent the process from completing, resulting in missing papers on your iPad. So, while marking with Turnitin, Joe recommends:
1. Go to Settings>General
2. Scroll down to Autolock
3. Turn Auto-lock to OFF (your iPad will not now go to sleep unless you press the power button)
4. Plug your iPad in to a charging source (you need to make sure your iPad does not run out of charge)
5. Open Turnitin App
6. Go to your class
7. Touch the ‘i’ icon top right to bring up the information about the class
8. Turn “Sync submissions” on
9. Press on screen to come out of the “i” panel
10. The submissions will now start to sync
11. This will take time…!
12. Do NOT switch to another app, open another app or generally do anything that puts the Turnitin app in to the background.
Joe also points out – rightly – that you will need enough space on your iPad to ensure that you can complete your downloads. Check ‘Settings’ / ‘General’ / ‘Usage’ to see your available storage. As a general rule of thumb, 1GB+ will probably be fine. You can use ‘Manage Storage’ to identify any apps that are using a lot of space.
A number of old themes are being retired in MyPad in June and have already been replaced with a new set of responsive designs that will work well on mobile devices. If you use a MyPad site for teaching or personal use it is worth checking whether you are using old themes (you will be prompted when you log in) and updating them or just consider one of the new themes to freshen up your site and make it smartphone friendly.
The NILE External Resources Site (NILEX), which lists free applications you can use to create content for use in NILE, has undergone such an update and continues to expand – there are now over 50 resources covered. Latest posts include Canva (an online graphics and infographics creator) and AppSheet (which creates free IOS and Android data-driven apps using Google Spreadsheets).
NILE sites have been, and continue to be, created for the 15/16 academic year for modules and programmes. We have changed the way that we roll out the sites, and are trialling automatically copying in content from last year’s site (with a matching site ID). There are a few exclusions to this which are mainly postgraduate modules. This is because the content that is copied is a snapshot of the 14/15 site at the time of copying . Therefore, for example, if we take a copy of the Spring NILE site last year into the Spring session for this year we could be taking content that is no longer used. It is more appropriate to wait and perform the copy from the Standard or Autumn cohort. This will need to be organised/managed manually.
Accessing and working on your 15/16 Sites
You can add sites to your NILE account by using the Manage My NILE Sites box on the Sites & Organisations tab, or get in touch with the NILE Administrator (Rachel McCart) to request the site is added to your account.
Your Learning Technologist (LT) will be in touch through Subject Leaders to organise workshop sessions where groups and individuals can attend and work on their sites to get them ready for the new year. Your LT will be in the session to help with any queries and provide guidance.
Submit your work
In performing the copies we had to choose to copy all the content or none. Unfortunately there is not a way for us to choose to exclude the ‘Submit your work’ area so we had to bring in that content too. As many of you may be aware this means that Turnitin submission links (Blackboard assignments are fine) will break, and therefore need to be removed from the 15/16 site (please DO NOT remove them from the 14/15 site), and new ones need to be created for assignments in the 15/16 year.
The NILE administrator (Rachel McCart) is working her way through performing this task on the new sites, but as I’m sure you can appreciate this is a lot for one person to do so it is taking some time. If you would like to expedite this process you can do it yourself. If you would like some guidance then check out the help tab on NILE and follow the link to Preparing your NILE site for the next academic year. Please just let Rachel know if you have done it, and which site(s) you’ve done it on so she can exclude them from her list.
What you will see in the new sites
You will notice that the content that has been copied in appears at the bottom of the left menu. You can click and drag this around to re-order it.
You will also notice that ‘Module materials’ has become ‘Module activities’, and ‘Assessments’ has become ‘Assessment information’. This is to move NILE sites in line with CAIeRO practice, and make it clearer to staff and students about what to expect when they click the link.
QAA Audit
The QAA audit is due to start at the beginning of August therefore your Sites need to be ready by the end of July: this is when a 10% sample of the 15/16 sites will be performed. For more details about the audit please get in touch with your Embedded Quality Officer.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, please comment on this post or email us at learntech@northampton.ac.uk
In LearnTech we are regularly asked by academic staff about where to get images for use in NILE, raising questions of copyright and attribution for use of those images.
Well, perhaps one useful place to start is with the following blog from John Spencer: Eight Free Photo Sites that Require No Attribution. It’s definitely a good place to start with ensuring that you have the appropriate permission to use the images that you have found on NILE, or in your slides.
P.S. The rest of his blog is pretty good too – worth signing up for as he sends out some useful tips and tricks for in the classroom and although generally directed at school teachers, I’ve picked up a few good ideas along the way – including this one 🙂
Sister to Qzzr, Pollcaster uses the same account details to create simple ‘one or the other’ type polls. A nice feature is that it collects age and gender information from participants (if they wish to share it – they get to share the results as a reward) and links them to a general (county/state/country) location.
You will need to use the <iframe> version of the embed code in MyPad or NILE – look for the ‘Having Trouble?’ option.
You can find information about other third party tools to incorporate in NILE (including the excellent Storify referred to in an earlier post by Belinda) on the NILEX site
Click the image to start the quiz. It would appear IE9 (installed on UN computers) won’t open this link properly, so please use Chrome or Firefox.
You can find out a bit more about the free tool used to create this quiz in the NILEX site. Quizzes can be embedded directly in NILE.
Another major marking season will soon be upon us and being prepared before the event can prevent avoidable stress for students and markers.
LearnTech are offering 90 minute SaGE refresher training courses in March and April, with an option for subject/division groups to review their own second marking and external examiner procedures afterwards.
Sessions are on 23 and 31 March (2-4), 21 (2-4) and 24 April (10-12). If you are part of a subject group in your school who want to use the review option, please book into the same session.
Booking is at:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/making-your-mark-count-a-sage-refresher-tickets-16118479807
Although some mapping applications are included as part of the NILE External Resources blog, more detailed use cases have been assembled in this Xerte learning unit to guide you through some possible applications of free mapping and associated software. This includes creating overlays, plotting images, exploring historic imagery, creating tours and crowd sourcing geographic data. Most tools allow the created content to be shared to viewers who will not need to register in any way.
Many of these use cases could be applied to collaborative student projects or research tasks which relate to specific geographic areas, though the requirement for registration of an editing tool will restrict their use as part of a summative assessment.
We hope to grow and improve this resources, so if you have any use case examples or other applications we would be very pleased to include them. Since this original post was made, we have added CartoDB as another resource.
Access the Panopto training session (44 minutes)
Busy staff often complain – with justification – that training isn’t available when they need it. Learntech are always looking for better ways to make training easier to access and, as part of our improvements for 2015, are starting to introduce ‘pop-up training’ options. These are sessions on topics suggested by small groups of staff who are able to spare around an hour at a time on a date to suit themselves. Once we have been able to arrange a trainer and the resources, we will offer more places to other members of staff through School managers and the staff Facebook group. This will be at relatively short notice – maybe as little as a week – but we hope that this option will prove popular.
Panopto was the subject of our first full session – requested by three members of staff, we actually saw 12 staff attend and have created an online resource for staff unable to attend as a result. You can access the Panopto training session here, with a Podcast version available if your browser or device has difficulty displaying that content. Producing a Panopto recording of a Panopto recording is a bit more complicated than just creating a Panopto recording, but the attendees got a lot out of the session and were contemplating some novel uses. The ability to collectively share notes between students and instructors was a feature many thought should be more widely used.
If you have any similar training needs and can arrange for at least two staff members to attend, we will be delighted to do something similar for you. Contact your School Learning Technologist or mail us at learntech@northampton.ac.uk with your requirements, numbers and possible dates.
