Getting Practical with IPR in E-Learning
Table of Contents
|
Instructional Designers / Learning Designers | Scriptwriters |
Subject Experts | Examiners |
Teachers /Lecturers | Usability Experts |
Students | Accessibility Experts |
Audio Designers & Editors |
Instructional / Technical Authors |
Video Designers & Editors |
Evaluation Experts |
Graphics Designers & Editors |
Database Designers |
Photographers | Project Managers |
Web Designers | Project Administrators |
Animators | |
Desktop Publishing & Typography | |
Programmers |
Media / Rights Tracker
Form |
|
Production Title | Name of the Course or Project etc. |
Title / Description of the media item |
e.g. top bar navigation icons |
Location / Place in Production | e.g. on all the content pages |
Purpose in Production | e.g. Navigate through the instructional content part of the site |
File Format | e.g. GIF & JPEG |
Name and Location of Master File(s) Note: ‘path’ to the folder may do |
e.g. in the course_archive/icons/top bar/tb1.gif, tb2.gif, tb3.jpg |
Created by (and employment status) | e.g. John Doe - freelance |
Adapted by (and employment status) | e.g. Peter Perfect - staff |
Content IPR (brief description and status) | e.g. Coca Cola bottle images from company web site and coke logo (copyright and trademark) – cleared, project permissions file ref. DMPP12 |
People / Rights Tracker
Form |
|
Name | John Doe |
Employment Status | e.g. Freelance |
Role / Job Title | Graphic Designer |
IPR Status | e.g. Copyright – Assigned e.g. Moral Rights - Waived |
Contract ref. | e.g. standard terms of freelance contract and job spec – contract ref. No. |
Rights Clearance Tracker Form |
|
Title | e.g. 12 Angry Men |
Project Permissions File Identifier |
e.g. DMPP14 |
Description / Synopsis and Use | e.g. Courtroom Drama. Useful for showing the importance of argument analysis and rhetorical skills |
Media Type | e.g. video |
Main Copyright Owner(s) | e.g. Broadcaster |
Main Moral Rights Holder(s) | e.g. Director |
Individual Content Rights Owner(s) | e.g. actors and performers, directors, producers (but not applicable under ERA) |
Clearance Status | e.g. video free to use for educational purposes under the ERA licence scheme |
Conditions / Restrictions | e.g. only for educational non-commercial use, with no time limit, only for and between institutions that are members of the |
ERA scheme. Not for use off Campus Costs | e.g. institutional ERA license fees |
The TrustDR project is mainly concerned with exploring the legal, organisational,
cultural and technical aspects of operating an institutional digital repository
of learning objects. The legal dimensions of e-learning particularly those
affecting the sharing and reuse of learning materials in the form of learning
objects are currently conceived of as presenting serious obstacles to
future development, so this project is very timely.
The real challenge is how the education sector can take advantage of the new digital media and technologies without having to pay a huge cost in terms of administration, legal fees and insurance? In this, the issue of trust is central. How can the education sector conduct its business within this environment in such a way that the various creators, publishers and consumers of intellectual property retain their trust? A social or economic system that has low levels of trust tends to have much higher running costs. In a low-trust system, expensive lawyers, contracts and insurance are used as a substitute for behavioural constraint. So, if trust reduces transaction costs in an economy how can we build and maintain it in the context of digital repositories? Some of the main barriers to the success of such repositories are not technical but legal and cultural.
Thus the project will be interested in looking at the cultural issues that need to be addressed in developing DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems. It will be concerned at how to arrive at an agreed legal expression of rights in the form of licences (especially those developed by the ‘Creative Commons’, http://creativecommons.org/) and user agreements from various groups of stakeholders, and whether there are any common patterns that can be identified and possibly transferred for use elsewhere. The project will also be looking at how these expressions of rights can be included in rights metadata using a Digital Rights Expression Language (DREL). The project will examine the types of protection and functionality that rights metadata may help provide, now and in the near future, and its possible utilisation in different parts of the lifecycle of a learning object. The project builds on previous JISC sponsored research and has produced a conceptual model for managing IPR in e-learning – see the next section.
The TrustDR framework for managing IPR in e-learning
The 6 layers on the left describe the components of a typical DRM system - these are briefly described below:
These first three stages all address the creation of a DRM policy.
The final three stages concern the projection of a DRM policy.
We can see that the first 3 layers (the creation of a DRM policy) are mostly concerned with the legal and socio-cultural (values, attitudes etc.) aspects of DRM. But as we move through the layers towards the centre and on to the final 3 layers (the projection of a DRM policy) we move more towards a concern with the technical factors involved in DRM. The arrows pointing toward the top and bottom of the diagram indicate this implementation continuum in DRM that encapsulates both the legal and socio-cultural aspects and also the technical issues.
Lying at the centre of the 6 layers is an area where the legal and socio-cultural aspects and the technical issues meet and have to communicate with each other for the DRM system to work. Because of this we have called this point the ‘Legal and Technical Nexus’, and it is at this point where the use of off-the-shelf licences such as those developed by the Creative Commons and possible derivatives of those used by JORUM would exist. Because these licences are both human and machine-readable they can perform this ‘nexus’ function.
Note: A useful analogy may be drawn between this diagram and the Open Systems Interconnection model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Systems_Interconnection--Reference_Model), which is used to simplify the description of complex computer network and communications systems by breaking them into simpler logical chunks. In a similar way our 6-layer model is used as a way of simplifying the DRM process for all those involved – so those involved in each stage of the model do not have to know about the other stages. The addition of the other elements to the 6 layers completes our TrustDR framework.
Teaching in higher education has traditionally been accorded a fairly
low status yet for most institutions income derived from teaching is the
major source of institutional wealth, with figures of 80% - 90% and above
not being uncommon. So, for most universities teaching is the de-facto
core business activity. As financial constraints bring this reality to
the surface and technologies such as Virtual Learning Environments (VLE’s)
are being deployed one of the emerging strategic gaps in institutional
management and policy is a lack of knowledge of how the law applies to
the use of teaching materials. The current push towards reuse of teaching
materials with learning objects and repositories has highlighted this
further. A useful paper commissioned by HEFCE on this subject found that
there was considerable ignorance and confusion in the sector - it can
be found at: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2003/03_08.htm
An important factor in our project work will be that much teaching material
will not actually be worth much in cash terms – and this will have
a big effect on any cost – benefit – risk analysis. Of course
this flies in the face of a lot of existing attitudes. An excellent discussion
of this can be found at this Bath University site http://www.bath.ac.uk/dacs/cdntl/pMachine/morriblog_comments.htm?id=P410_0_4_0
We will need to take on board that the cash value of learning objects
will vary greatly. It is likely that learning object value will lie along
a continuum from low value (but high utility) classroom handouts to high
value distance learning materials with embedded pedagogic strategy, tutor
notes and high media production values, IMS Learning Designs (Koper, &
Tattersall 2004) may well fit into the latter category.
Although not really in the public consciousness yet, the IMS Learning Design language is currently causing a great deal of excitement in the e-learning community, it is a free open source software language, (http://www.imsglobal.org/learningdesign/index.html). It allows learning designers to model, in a generic, formal way, who does what, when and with which content and services in order to achieve learning objectives. It enables their activities to be specified in coordinated learning flows that are analogous to groupware workflows, and it supports group and collaborative learning of many different kinds. Using the LD language, designers are able to talk in terms of pedagogy rather than technology, helping to bring learning to the forefront in e-learning. What will be very interesting is to see how individuals and institutions attach a value to these shareable learning designs and how they may choose to share them.
Again, the value (real and perceived) of the materials will play a factor in the cost – benefit -risk analysis, which may result in collections also being categorised by value – with appropriate metadata to provide necessary protection.
So where can we look for some realistic guidance on operating a digital
repository? The information retrieval community is a good candidate, representing
a fruitful if sometimes tense collaboration between information science,
computer science and librarians (van Rijsbergen, 2000). If we can agree
that an institutional digital repository of learning objects is a form
of digital library then Sølvberg (2000) proposes three criteria
that a such a library should share with a traditional ‘bricks and
mortar and books’ library, they are: permanent, man¬aged, quality
controlled. This coincides nicely with research about metadata quality
and management issues (Barton and Currier etc) and gives us a ‘big
picture’ view of how a repository should fit into existing institutional
structures.
Casey, J., Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) In Networked E-Learning
- a beginners guide for content developers, (2004) JISC Legal service.
Available online: http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/publications/johncasey_1.htm.
Currier, S., Barton, J., O’Beirne, R., Ryan, B. (2004) Quality assurance for digital learning object repositories: issues for the metadata creation process, ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology Vol.12, No.1 (Mar. 2004), pp. 5-20.
Barton, J., Currier, S. & Hey, J. (2003) Building quality assurance into metadata creation: an analysis based on the learning objects and e-prints communities of practice, DC-2003 Proceedings of the International DCMI Metadata Conference and Workshop, September 28-October 2, 2003, Seattle, Washington USA, pp. 39-48. Available online: http://www.siderean.com/dc2003/201_paper60.pdf
HEFCE, (2003) Intellectual property rights in e-Learning programmes Report of the Working Group: a good practice guide for higher education institutions on intellectual property rights in e-Learning programmes. Available online: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2003/03_08.htm
Robyn, P., Dalziel J, (2003) “Implications of COLIS for course development: The need for secondary usage meta-data” http://www.melcoe.mq.edu.au/res.htm
Ryan, B. & Walmsley, S. (2003) Implementing metadata collection: a project’s problems and solutions. Learning technology, Vol. 5, no. 1, Jan. 2003. Available online: http://lttf.ieee.org/learn_tech/issues/january2003/index.html#3
Sølvberg Ingeborg: Digital Libraries and Information Retrieval. Lecture Notes in Information Retrieval (ESSIR 2000). Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Publisher: Springer-Verlag Heidelberg; ISSN: 0302-9743
Koper, R. & Tattersall C., (2004). Learning Design: A handbook on Modelling and Delivering Networked Education and Training, Publisher: Springer, Berlin.
Van Rijsbergen, C.J., Getting into Information retrieval, Lecture Notes in Information Retrieval (ESSIR 2000). Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Publisher: Springer-Verlag Heidelberg; ISSN: 0302-97
Oppenheim, C. and Giavarra, E., (2001) E. JISC/DNER Copyright and Licensing Guidelines Available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=projman_copyright
Intrallect Ltd., (2004), Digital Rights Management: a study into Digital
Rights Management (DRM) issues in higher and further education. Commissioned
by JISC 2004. Available at http://www.intrallect.com/drm-study/
The JISC RoMEO Project (Rights MEtadata for Open archiving). Project outputs
available at http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/