Quick Tips

Key points to remember:

  1. Most of the legal issues are the same whether the teaching is done in person or online.
  2. If it was okay to do in class, it is often okay to do online. Western’s best practice is to use our learning management system, OWL, to share protected material – especially since access is limited to enrolled and authenticated students in the class.
  3. You can continue to apply Western’s Copyright Decision Map and Fair Dealing Analysis tool to assist with copyright questions or contact copyright@uwo.ca.

Additional advice:

  • Use university password-protected systems like OWL to make copyright protected material available to your students. Guidelines from the Centre for Teaching and Learning provide additional information and strategies and tools for online course delivery.
  • Post your in-class slides to OWL.  Slides provided by textbook publishers can almost always be used, according to their Terms of Use.
  • Course readings rules for print and online posting to OWL are similar. Either use Western’s guidelines for fair dealing or the course readings service to make content available. Provide a direct link to library-subscribed content or link out to material on the public web.
  • Western Libraries’ Course Readings service can help you copyright check supplementary course content, create links to e-books and journal articles and more.
  • Western Libraries may be able to help you find alternative content, and we have a large collection of online journals and e-books that can help support online learning. Your librarian can also help you find openly licensed teaching materials like Open Educational Resources (OER).
  • Use phone apps like Genius Scan or Adobe Scan to easily scan to post print materials OWL within the limits allowed by Fair Dealing or the Educational Institutions exceptions. Make scanned PDF files more accessible for your students by using an optical character recognition (OCR) online tool to convert "non-selectable" text files into more accessible versions.
  • Sharing audiovisual material like films and audio files is more complex. But remember you can still link to legally posted online content (from YouTube etc.). Standard commercial streaming options like Netflix, Crave or Disney Plus that students may also subscribe to can be an option – though some students may not have access to those services. Copyright exceptions 30.01 can also apply; contact copyright@uwo.ca if you need help to implement this copyright exception as there are rules that need to be followed to use it. 


Creative Commons BY-NC 

2020/03/16 - adapted from CARL and Ryerson University template