This paper focuses on the ways educators can work within the guidelines of copyright while using digital media to develop educational content in legal and ethical ways by exploring several key contemporary trends in digital content creation. Educators need not create learning materials from scratch, as the pool of resources available via the…

The purpose of this dissertation was to study perceptions of faculty and administrators at institutions of higher education on copyright ownership of faculty-created digital course content. The central question for this study was: Who had copyright ownership rights of faculty-created digital content and in what manner was copyright ownership…

Conducted in conjunction with an institute on open textbook adaptation, this study compares textbook evaluations from practicing K-12 classroom teachers (n = 30) on three different types of textbooks utilized in their contexts: copyright-restricted, open, and open/adapted. Copyright-restricted textbooks consisted of those textbooks already in use…

Open Educational Resources (OER) emerged within the context of open education which is typically characterized by the sharing of knowledge and resources and the exchange of ideas. Unisa as a mega open distance learning (ODL) university has publicly communicated its intention to take part in the use and creation of OER. As global and local…

Reusable learning objects support packaging of educational materials allowing their discovery and reuse. Open educational resources emphasize the need for open licensing and promote sharing and community involvement. For both teachers and learners, finding appropriate tried and tested resources on a topic of interest and being able to incorporate…

Plagiarism is a complex issue in need of reexamination. A common misconception is there is consensus on what constitute plagiarism, and general agreement that engaging in plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty is a major breech of ethics. There seems to be little concern for differentiating degrees of seriousness; the intentional…

In this paper, the authors present some of the most important lessons they have learned from teaching courses, conducting workshops, writing articles, and supervising graduate student research on the educational uses of digital storytelling. The guidelines described here are categorized within the ADDIE instructional design framework and are…

There are significant privacy, intellectual property, copyright and disclosure risks associated with the ill-considered use of social networking sites, however, the implementation of regulatory actions may also undermine the social and emerging educational utility of social networking sites for young people. Inevitably the burden of dealing with…

Attitudes are changing in education globally to promote the open sharing of educational courses and resources. The aim of this study was to explore staff awareness and attitudes towards "open educational resources" (OER) as a benchmark for monitoring future progress. Faculty staff (n = 6) were invited to participate in semi-structured…

Low-cost personal computers, wireless access technologies, the Internet, and computer-equipped classrooms allow the design of novel and complementary methodologies for teaching digital information security in electrical engineering curricula. The challenges of the current digital information era require experts who are effectively able to…

As part of its Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Future of Scholarly Communication Project, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) has hosted two meetings to explore how peer review relates to scholarly communication and academic values. In preparation for an April 2010 workshop, four working papers were developed and circulated. They…

This book, a resource for educators, uses the theme of media literacy as a lens through which to view and discuss social networking and Web 2.0 environments. There is ongoing and positive research on the participatory culture created by youth who are heavily involved in the new digital technologies, yet schools tend to avoid these mediums for fear…

School library websites enhance and explain the services provided by the library. Most schools have a library website. Jurkowski (2004) reviewed thirty-four school library websites and ranked the most common features: website links, databases, policies, Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), and websites by subject. These features give patrons a…

Like many universities worldwide, the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa has joined the open educational resources (OER) movement, making a selection of teaching and learning materials available through its OER directory, UCT OpenContent. However, persuading and then supporting busy academics to share their teaching materials as OER…

Description centers on an approach for efficiently incorporating online media resources into course and classroom. Consideration is given to pedagogical rationale, types of media, locating programs and clips, content retrieval and delivery, copyright issues, and typical problems experienced by instructors and students using online resources. In…