Tips from the AEJMC Teaching Committee

How to turn an Intellectual Property “incident” into a teaching moment

(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, September 2009 issue)

After more than 25 years of full-time teaching, I thought I had seen it all. But after the last meeting of the Visual Communication course I team taught this spring, a student emailed my colleague and me to thank us for the great panel discussion that day. A panel of professionals had answered students’ questions and freely shared valuable insights about their on-the-job experiences.

It wasn’t the “Thank you” that got my attention. It was the fact that the student had digitally recorded the panel discussion in its entirety. Apparently, the recording turned out so well that the student wanted to make it available to the rest of the class.

I had visions of lectures showing up on YouTube without us ever knowing about it. I’ve been known as an early adopter of technology for teaching. But I was not comfortable with this possibility. I saw this as an opportunity for a teaching moment and responded to the student’s request as follows:

While we encourage active participation and appreciate the proper use of technology in class, we do not appreciate that you recorded the panel discussion without letting us know ahead of time. It was unethical for you to do this. Our syllabus clearly states that you need prior permission from the people involved before you start recording. To refresh your memory, here is the part of the syllabus that addresses that:

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION
Lectures given in this course are the property of the instructors and Kennesaw State University. Class lectures may not be recorded in any form without prior permission from the instructors and any guest lecturers that may speak to this class. Recordings, including class notes, may not be used for commercial purposes.

I can’t speak for my fellow panelists, but I would not have hesitated to give you permission to record our discussion and to share it with your fellow students from this class. But now, it is after the fact.

Since this is an educational environment, however, we are giving you a second chance. If you can get written permission from [the panelists], you may proceed with sharing your recording with your fellow students.”

Within a few hours, the student responded with an apology. Apparently, he decided to record the panel at the last minute as a test of his new digital recorder and didn’t expect the recording to turn out so well. He thought it would have been a shame for this panel discussion to go unheard for those who were unable to attend class. He admitted that he learned a valuable lesson from this experience and thanked us for giving him a second chance.

So, here are a few lessons we can learn from this experience:

1. Have an “Intellectual Property Protection” statement in your syllabus and discuss it with your students at the beginning of the semester. Feel free to adopt and adapt the one provided above, but make sure to include any specific guidelines from your own institution. While each institution usually has policies regarding intellectual property, you may not find one that specifically addresses lectures.

2. Add your name, date and copyright (©) to every slide of your PowerPoint presentation. Do the same for any handouts you author. This helps protect your intellectual property, and it allows students to properly cite you in their papers. In order to assure the best legal defense, one professor I know sends hard copies of his lectures and handouts to himself via snail mail and never opens the postmarked envelope.

3. While we might feel honored to see some of our best lectures show up on YouTube, some of our worst might end up there, too. In either case, it is not the kind of distance-learning we intend. I recommend monitoring “shared resources” by Googling your name and/or your lecture titles and check YouTube.com on a regular basis. You may not need to take legal action, but, at least, you will know what students notice about your lectures. At best, you can turn “incidents” into teaching moments.

By Birgit Wassmuth,
Kennesaw State University,
AEJMC Teaching Committee