Copyright

Arizona State University's Learning Enterprise develops a variety of educational pathways and courses, regardless of whether a person is admitted to ASU.  These open online learning opportunities have the added advantage of offering students the opportunity to receive full college credit for a course, provided they pay a registration fee, which they may choose to do after passing the course.

Because these classes are open to anyone, and purely offered online, some copyright exceptions that we usually rely on for instruction purposes do not apply. Another limitation is that you cannot link to online resources provided by the ASU Library, which are only available to students with an ASURITE ID and password. Here, we'll talk about some best practices for evaluating course materials if you are teaching an open course or creating educational content for other open platforms, such as Baobab or SolarSPELL. The Open Education Library Guide may also be helpful for information about open licenses, as well as additional sources for open educational resources.

Link out: It is preferable to link out to files if they are available on the web. Sharing a link to any resource that is freely available online is generally acceptable, however, there are some accessibility issues to consider. For example, YouTube videos may not be available to students in certain countries, or a personal website might not have the capability to handle the increased traffic caused by thousands of students trying to access it at once. 

Public Domain: these works are not protected by copyright.

Creative Commons: Creative Commons licenses tell you in advance what you're permitted to do with the work, without having to ask for permission from the copyright owner. As long as you comply with the terms of the license, you can use the work in your class. Just be aware of the terms - for example, if you modify or adapt content for your course using the CC-BY-SA license, you would need to have the ability to assign that same license to your course. It's unlikely that you would want to choose that option. The Mason OER Metafinder, created by George Mason University, is a search engine that indexes specific open education repositories, such as MIT Open CourseWare, OpenStax, and Merlot. 

Fair Use: Fair Use still applies to MOOC courses, but your analysis will need to consider that your use has the potential to be exposed to a much broader audience. This is probably where the majority of your decisions will lie, and will need to be determined on a case by case basis. Review the Fair Use tab for more detailed information on making your own Fair Use evaluations, as well as the Guidelines box below. Additionally, here are some general questions to ask yourself when you are evaluating material for your course:

1. How does this material help me to make my point?
2. Do I need this particular work to make my point, or is there a potential (preferably open access) substitute?
3. How much of the material do I need to use? Would it be possible to use only part of it?
4. Is my use transformative? Have I made the link between the work and the point I wish to make clear?

Get Permission: Sometimes, getting permission from the copyright holder will be the only or best recourse. The Copyright Advisory Office at Columbia University Libraries has a great overview of procedures for asking a copyright owner permission to use a work. 

Attribution: In all cases, as a matter of good scholarly practice, you should acknowledge the original source in your slides or other class materials. If including attribution on the particular slide or at the time when the work is used would harm the flow of the instruction, acknowledgment may appear at the end of an individual lecture

A special note regarding TED Talks

Unless otherwise noted, TED Talks are released under CC-BY-ND-NC 4.0 License. They also have a detailed explanation of what this means for the use of their videos in their Usage Policy. In short, you are free to use TED Talks for non-commercial uses if:

1. You attribute the content to TED with a link to their site
2. You use their embeddable player (you are not allowed to download the file and upload it to another platform)
3. You use the video in its entirety and do not modify it in any way.

If your use is commercial, or if you want to modify the content, you must contact TED for permission.