Last year the Dutch foundation UvO (Uitgeversorganisatie voor onderwijslicenties) performed a check on what material had been shared via Maastricht University’s digital learning environment. If we were to pay the fine because of illegal use of resources, we would face a bill with six digits! Do you know how many pages of licensed resources you are permitted to use or how many images you may use in your PowerPoint presentations or course manual?

Digital content

In times of hybrid and distance education it is a challenge to organise education (completely) online. Besides topics as how to meet and lecture effectively, you will also need to refer and use all content in digital format.

• Offer your resources via the Keylinks reference list; you can select and upload references in Keylinks, the library will take care of copyright check and make the content available.
• Take notice of the Easy access agreement distinguishing types of extracts of copyright protected resources for use in education. According to this agreement, Maastricht University pays a lump sum every year. In short this makes it possible to use extracts up till 50 pages with a max of 25% of the whole work.
• Search for open available material to offer to your students. Adapt for instance the settings in Google (advanced search) to ‘Creative Common licenses’ or browse in repositories with open educational resources like OER commons or Merlot when you are looking for content you want to use in your PowerPoint presentation or course book. There are also platforms offering:

• • open courseware like Dariah Teach (a platform with courses and learning material about various Digital Humanities-related topics)
  • domain specific repositories offering images, videos and quizzes, e.g. in the field of anatomy or interactive math & stat exercises
  • domain-transcendent repositories like LibreTexts (with complete textbooks), OER Commons (a library of open educational resources), or the Khan Academy with educational videos and channels or websites with copyright free photographs.

• Whenever you use resources for your education (readings, images, graphs, videos, etc) always cite your source.
• Learn more about copyright and check the information on copyright offered by the Maastricht University Library.

Embedding OER in the library collection

The library has taken up the job to search and offer relevant, quality checked repositories and websites with open educational resources. We will soon start embedding these in the Online Library and will inform you about related services on selecting and offering content to your students. If you want to share your experiences in using OER, please let us know.

SURF provides information on their website if you want to get introduced to making use of other peoples’ open educational resources.  The library also created a tutorial in which you learn to judge the quality of resources you find on the Internet.

Author: UM Library

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.

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