Copyright makes me nervous. I struggle with copyright and fair use for images used for graphical abstracts that students create. Will Cross, Meredith Jacob, Peter Jaszi and Prue Adler presented at OERxDomains21 about harmonizing national copyright exceptions. I know Will Cross and have benefitted tremendously from his expertise in OER and copyright. I wanted to learn what else Will is up to and watched this session. Jacbob talked about the core questions behind Fair Use: are you doing something new or different (something “transformative”) with the material and is the amount you are using appropriate? Jacob talked about The Code they developed with four core use cases: critique, illustration, learning resources, and repurposing of educational content. Jaszi talked about what they learned from their study and the challenges of harmonizing copyright law. Cross wrapped up the discussion by summarizing AND allowing time for open discussion. I have had the pleasure of giving a couple of presentations with Cross and love how organized he is! Cross mentioned a phrase: “Good pedagogy is good copyright practice” which I found really interesting! Jaszi mentioned that often nations is the South have more “hospitable” copyright laws for OER use. I found this intriguing, and Jaszi mentioned the evolution of copyright laws in some nations. Cross ended by mentioning the difficulties in “translating” laws from other countries and their use cases. I often wonder how much time and resources should we devote to educating students creating OERs about these issues. Would this be a topic that could be addressed in an online module or does it require more discussion and analyses of use cases?
The next session by Grant Potter and Anne-Marie Scott entitled “Fostering Resiliency with Platform Cooperativism” centered on building platforms for bringing people together. Potter and Scott are in Canada and started by defining “the platform economy” as platforms that are innovation technologies and often involved in matchmaking. The Platform University concept and how site licenses and software may be having unintended consequences in the functioning of our institutions were briefly discussed. Scott talked about what exploring how digital education platforms can “shape and frame” educational activities. The Platform Cooperativism was designed to be the alternative to extractive practices. Scott mentioned that thirteen institutions in Canada were using their platform! Named the OpenETC, the platform has provided value to institutions with a shared model. The platform uses WordPress and Mattermost, an alternative to Slack that can be customized. The use cases they discussed were common and discoverable e-learning tutorials on the OpenETC site. Scott mentioned examples of how the OpenETC helped academics quickly share and discover resources while lowering technology & maintenance barriers. The use cases made me think about the power in a common or centralized platform that provides access to multiple institutions. I wonder if the UNC system can do something similar? Instead of everyone re-inventing and learning new software and implementing instances of platforms, what would be needed to start an open learning platform we can all use and contribute to?
