Week 11: Class Resources and Intellectual Property

Intellectual property and copyright issues are always closely related to every educator and student. Educators inevitably have to deal with these issues when they are using resources and materials for their class, etc. As for students, to avoid plagiarism, they  need to pay special attention to these issues when they are working on their assignments and papers. However, the reality is that not everyone knows and understands the rules of copyright and intellectual property clearly. For a lot of people, these rules are just blurry concepts. I guess this is one of the reasons why some college students plagiarize even without realizing their behaviors are wrong. Intellectual property and copyright issues have been becoming more and more complicated nowadays in the digital age.

I still remember a few years ago, before I officially started to teach Chinese in Kansas, there was an orientation for new teachers in our institute. One topic we discussed in this orientation was about intellectual property. Since we had to design and use PowerPoint in the class every day, we always embedded some online resources such as graphics and videos in the slides. Our supervisor emphasized that the URLs of these online resources were required to be added to the slides as well, but we didn’t have a detailed and comprehensive guide that teachers could consult. After that orientation, I was just sure that I wouldn’t have any trouble as long as I marked all the resources. I am glad that Ko and Rossen talk about these issues in the book. Their illustrations let me have a better understanding of intellectual property in the context of education. I found the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia is very handy and useful. I also like the “Assuring Academic Integrity among Your Students” part. The tips mentioned in this section are useful for teachers to help their students guard against plagiarism.