Fair use and the teach act

Fair use and the teach act

This year I am teaching AP Environmental Science as an online class for Floyd County Schools.  For this, I have created some of my own content.  I like to do this because it gives the class a personal touch and allows me to teach the material as I like.  

However, it is unnecessary to create all the content needed to teach the class.  Creative Commons content is immensely helpful for teaching online. Most of the material that I use is available under creative commons.

There are also laws that allow teachers to use materials that are not licensed as Creative Commons.  Fair use and the TEACH act give teachers access to much more material than they would have otherwise available.

Fair use

The Georgia Teacher Open Online website nicely summarized the basics of fair use as follows.

1. The purpose and character of the use
2. The nature of the work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the work as a whole
4. The effect of the use on the market or potential market for the original work

"The TEACH Act allows for copyright exemptions only when the following criteria are met:

Materials that I used must be used for education - not entertainment or profit.  This is easier to show when the material used was designed for educational purposes (documentaries for example).  The material used must be used in appropriate lengths.  If only part of a program applies to what is being taught in my class, only that part should be used.  I am not allowed to use commercial test prep material as that is taking away from the potential market for commercial test prep material.

Teach act

The Georgia Teacher Open Online website nicely summarized the Teach Act as follows.

• The institution must be an accredited, non-profit educational institution.
• The use must be part of mediated instructional activities.
• The use must be limited to a specific number of students enrolled in a specific class.
• The use must either be for ‘live’ or asynchronous class sessions.
• The use must not include the transmission of textbook materials, materials “typically purchased or acquired by students,” or works developed specifically for online uses."

As a teacher at a public high school, all of my uses qualify as educational.  I use these materials in my live class for direct instruction and in my online class as asynchronous presentations.  My course is not a MOOC.  In fact, it has a very small enrollment.  The only thing I have to  be careful of is using textbook or test prep material and of using only appropriately sized clips from larger works.  There are a number of good, old documentaries for environmental science.  If they are not in Creative Commons or the Public Domain though, I can only pull clips appropriate to a particular topic.

One thing that I did learn and that I must start doing in my class is this.  When using copyrighted material for legitimate class purposes, students must be informed that the material is copyrighted and that copyright law may apply depending on their use.  This can be done for individual assignments, or it can be made clear as part of a course introduction and lesson in online etiquette.

In short, fair use and the Teach Act give me much more freedom than I would otherwise have as an online teacher.  The allow me to find and use reliable content much more easily without having to create so much material myself.