Vetting My Existing Materials

Certainly nobody out there is excited about the prospect of going through all of those presentations and handouts and LMS modules you've been using for years without issue, just so that they can be included in some sort of "initiative."  There's little enough time as there is, and trying to find time to actually convert materials that already work may seem totally out of the question.

Our response is simple: though you don't have to make the transition to OER, you are pretty much obligated in some way or another to make your course materials available online.  This might be the adoption of a "flipped" classroom model or simply using LMS to post materials that you address in class.  No matter how you do it, though, you will need to keep it legit.

As disappointing or uncomfortable as it might be, we want to vet our old materials well before sharing them (even with our students) digitally.  Here are the two things to do in order to make sure that you're operating within the boundaries of copyright law.

  1. Remove all visual content that is not original (unless your use of it is expressly licensed).  We can go about replacing those images and graphs with ones that we can use or can generate ourselves.
  2. Verify that your informational content is not "borrowed" from your favorite textbook.  We hope and pray that you know that teachers can commit plagiarism, too.  Even if you have sufficiently quoted and cited things like definitions and explanations, the electronic sharing is unacceptable.  If you don't want to go about defining and explaining every basic concept from scratch, then utilize any of the various materials that are out there and freely licensed just for that purpose.

This isn't news to us, since we've covered this in previous sections of this course, but it's worth repeating that the electronic sharing of copyrighted content--even with just your students through the learning management system--is electronic reproduction and hard to defend.  Again, the difference between the material being available online and just being shown to student in class is that you are releasing that content to the world.  A student looking at a passage from a copyrighted article on the screen in the classroom isn't able to immediately copy/download the material.  A student accessing your material on your course LMS is. 

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's look at a few examples of OER for composition and rhetoric.