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…

This essay regards the licensing of digital content in universities. The author states that the academic community has overwhelmingly adopted course-management software systems such as Blackboard to distribute electronic course materials to students. She argues that such use presents a significant problem: the absence of any institutional…

This study describes an investigation of the intellectual property policies of a stratified random sample of public and private Carnegie Doctoral Research-Extensive Universities. Current copyright law was reviewed as well as the status of the "academic exception." University policies were examined to determine whether or not they…

The role of distance education is shifting. Traditionally distance education was limited in the number of people served because of production, reproduction, and distribution costs. Today, while it still costs the university time and money to produce a course, technology has made it such that reproduction costs are almost non-existent. This shift…

Issues related to the illegal copying or piracy of educational software in the schools and its potential effect on quality software availability are discussed. Copyright violation is examined as a reason some software producers may be abandoning the school software market. An explanation of what the copyright allows and prohibits in terms of…

This paper addresses the difficult issues of balancing faculty and university rights and responsibilities regarding courseware and courseware modules developed as both commissioned and non-commissioned works. The ways in which this debate affects those who are engaged in building their own online courses for their universities, courseware…

The second of the Pew Symposia in Learning and Technology, whose purpose is to conduct an ongoing national conversation about issues related to the intersection of learning and technology, focused on policy issues related to the development and ownership of online courses and course materials. This paper builds on the work of participants, and…