Availing of the Shift to a Paperless Classroom

We know that this is happening because we've all seen it (and many of us have already done it).  The point is: take advantage of the opportunity.  As we find ourselves building materials directly into LMS or digitizing what we've been photocopying for years, we must keep in mind that this is not only a chance to build open resources but to rethink some of our practices. 

The digital shift brings along with it a set of restrictions (and, potentially, headaches) involving how we use copyrighted material.  We've already discussed this in the second module, but it deserves emphasis here.

Byte: With the transition to electronic resources, we have no choice but to keep our resources ethical and legal, so developing them as OER isn't really that much of an additional task.

We stress this here because there are just some things we can't do online that we can do in the classroom, like scan a copy of an article and distribute it.  If we make 23 copies of an article and pass it out once in class, that's fine; it's defensible fair use.  However, digitizing the article and making it available in that way is a permanent action that could, potentially, have a serious effect on the copyrighted material's profitability (now that there's an unlicensed .pdf floating around out there).

Take this obligation to transition to digital as a chance to be conscious about how you create your teaching materials, and the open resource part of it will just come naturally.