Keeping Your Thesis Legal

This booklet accompanies workshops presented by the Archbishop Alemany Library, focused on theses and rights risk management. It gives you more information on the copyright implications of making your thesis available on the web, as required by your graduate program. While its focus is primarily on digital theses (eTheses) rather than traditional printed versions, there is some coverage of the copyright law differences between the two different formats

Curriculum, intellectual property rights and open educational resources in British universities — and beyond

Is the curriculum in British universities being influenced by decisions about ownership of intellectual property rights (IPR) in ‘open educational resources’ (OERs) that are available online under Creative Commons licenses, free of charge? This paper provides the context for, describes and analyses three significant examples in British higher education where OERs are being created for use by academics and learners on campus or at a distance. OpenLearn and iTunes U, two of the British examples, are drawn from the Open University of the United Kingdom, which teaches over 200,000 undergraduate and graduate students almost entirely at a distance. The third example, OTTER, is at the University of Leicester, a campus university in England with about 7,000 distance learners. Both universities depend on government funding, student fees, research and entrepreneurial income. All three examples are funded indirectly by the British government, though OpenLearn has received substantial US foundation support as well. In presenting these examples, the questions arise of whether the projects are supply- or demand-driven, and of whether they are altruistic or not. Debate over intellectual property rights has influenced creation of the OERs and vice versa, but from these three examples it seems doubtful whether, as yet, OERs and IPR have significantly influenced British universities’ curriculum. The paper ends with discussion of how OERs created in British universities are influencing teaching and learning in other countries, as globalisation advances

Manufacturing Pasts: Industrial Change in Twentieth Century Britain - Early Impact Video

Video describing issues addressed by the project and its early impact on teaching, learning and research

Sample OER put up and take down policy

As OER collections grow by institution, new policy decisions will need to be made by managers and leaders. As an example, this OER states the put-up and take-down policy for the University of Leicester OER Repository.

Copyright: All rights reserved or all rights reversed?

In this OER Tania Rowlett and Dr Samuel Nikoi introduce and discuss Copyright as part of the online open space OTTER Symposium.. Including its advantages, disadvantages and possible solutions to copyright issues within OER production. Discussion includes contributions from Dr Alejandro Armellini and Dr Richard Mobbs amongst others.

Final report

This project focused on digitisation of historical primary sources relating to industrial change in Britain since the second world war and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER)

CORRE: a framework for evaluating and transforming teaching materials into open educational resources

Open education resources (OER) are taking centre-stage in many higher educational institutions globally, driven by the need to raise institutional profiles, improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning and achieve universal access to education. Many academics attracted to the idea of turning teaching materials into OER have, however, found the experience challenging and daunting. This article puts forward a workflow framework that provides guidance for evaluating existing teaching materials and turning them into OER using indicative questions against which they can be assessed on quality, ease of access, adaptability and potential usefulness. Recommendations are also made for moving the OER agenda forward, including changing institutional cultures, designing for openness, quality assurance and sustainabilit