Instructional materials—such as readings, videos, and other content—are the everyday tools students engage with to meet learning objectives. While there are countless types of materials you can use, there are several best practices that apply to nearly all: copyright compliance, accessibility, and professionalism.
Copyright Compliance
Concerns about copyright have been magnified by the growth of online education. Copyright is the legal protection of any tangible, original, and creative intellectual property. If someone creates content that meets all three criteria, that person does not need to do anything more to be protected by copyright. In the United States, a work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form.
Copyright grants creators six defined rights:
- Reproduce the work
- Distribute the work
- Display the work publicly
- Perform the work publicly
- Create derivative works based on the original
- Assign or license the work
Copyright Infringement
Copyright infringement occurs when someone other than the creator uses a work for his or her own purposes. In the online classroom, copyright infringement can occur when you embed a YouTube video in your course, download someone’s PDF and upload it to your course, or even when you use drafter-provided content in your online course. The consequences of this can include:
- Court-ordered injunctions
- Seizure and disposal of infringing materials
- Financial restitution
Fortunately, fair use laws allow educators to use certain copyrighted works legally, under specific circumstances.
Fair Use
There are several provisions and techniques that help educators use some portion of copyrighted works without having to pay or get permission. One way to do so is by following fair use guidelines. These guidelines allow others to use copyrighted material without compromising the rights of copyright holders.
When using a copyrighted work, it’s important to consider all four fair use guidelines. These are:
- Purpose and Character of Use: Is the work used for commercial or noncommercial purposes? Fair use allows noncommercial uses, such as for teaching, scholarship, and research.
- Nature of the Work: Is the work factual or creative? Fair use is more likely to apply to factual works (e.g., research) than to creative works (e.g., novels or music).
- Amount and Substantiality: How much of the work are you using? Using a small, less significant portion of a work is more likely to be considered fair use.
- Market Effect: Will your use of the work impact the creator’s ability to make money from it? If your use diminishes the work’s marketability, it’s less likely to be fair use.
If a work doesn’t qualify for fair use, you can seek permission from the copyright holder. If you want to use materials like textbooks or PowerPoint slides, you’re generally allowed to do so under fair use, but you’ll still need permission to post them online. Also, be sure to check for any clauses that may affect how you can use materials in your course.
If a work is available freely online and not behind paywalls or passwords, you can link to it without permission—but avoid embedding it directly in your course, as this could confuse students about ownership and authorship.
By understanding fair use, seeking permission when necessary, and linking properly, you can avoid copyright issues in your online classroom.
Accessibility
In designing an online course, you always need to consider the variety of students you’ll be teaching. Learning to design for students who have disabilities (whether visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive) will not only provide you with basic design principles, but also protect you from possible legal action.
In the United States, accessibility standards are set by two laws: Section 508 and the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). Section 508 refers to a federal law (the Rehabilitation Act) that requires U.S. government electronic information services to be accessible to people who have disabilities. In addition, Title 5 of the ADA clarifies that online classes must fulfill the requirements of both the ADA and Section 508.
Designing for accessibility isn’t difficult. In general, keep your content simple, adhere to best design practices, and deliver your content in manageable chunks. More specifically, avoid formatting, label your relevant images, and provide an alternative to any file you create.
Feel free to take a look at our accessibility resources, where we’ve gathered best practices in designing for accessibility onto a couple pages. It might be useful to print this out and keep it handy as you design instructional materials for your course.
Professionalism
Writing your own instructional materials is great for a variety of reasons. It helps you better meet your students’ individual needs, and it helps add authenticity and individuality to your course. As great as these things are, though, they carry their own set of complications. When students engage with these materials, they should be able to expect that they meet professional standards. In addition to being well-edited and free from grammatical or spelling errors, they should be free from bias and should not privately benefit the instructor.
Editing
First impressions are important not only in your day-to-day interactions, but in how students are introduced to your course content. Designing instructional materials that contain spelling and grammar issues makes a course appear unprofessional. In much the way many instructors expect their students to submit work that’s free from grammatical errors, course developers should hold themselves to the same standard. This isn’t just an expectation; it’s a model for how your students should expect to write when they submit their work.
Bias
The online classroom is an excellent place to promote unique, meaningful student thought, and ensuring that instructional materials are free from bias is an essential step you can take toward achieving that goal. Writing instructional materials in an unbiased tone is important to communicating in a professional, academic, and respectful manner. Students can (and will) form opinions on a topic, and a course’s instructional materials should be a foundation upon which they can be built.
Private Benefit
Being able to speak to your professional experience is a great way to demonstrate the relevancy of your content and your credentials as an instructor. Despite this, your course is not a place to promote your business and/or otherwise benefit yourself. Instructional materials are always beneficial—they help students meet learning objectives and prepare them for assessments, after all—but their primary benefit should always be to the student, not the instructor.
Alongside learning objectives and assessments, instruction is one of the three key elements of the course design triangle. Instructional materials are much more than reading assignments or video lectures, too; they’re the foundation off of which students begin meeting learning objectives, and they’re one of the tools they use to prepare for assessments. While it’s important that these materials remain copyright compliant, accessible, and professional, it’s also important that they be aligned with the other elements of the course design triangle, as doing so creates an effective, purposeful learning experience for your students.
