Teaching Ideas for Higher Education Faculty

It is advisable to give this assignment in conjunction with a rather large unit of instruction that will take several weeks to complete (e.g., the provided example is for Hamlet). This will allow time for students to seek and receive copyright permission. The example provided is for an English class, but it would work just as well for virtually any discipline. It would also work well for 11th and 12th graders, or in an online course.

• Have students produce group multimedia projects where one of the requirements is to demonstrate copyright compliance.
• The projects can be either in the form of web pages or PowerPoint, and you should encourage them to incorporate as many outside sources or multimedia elements as tastefully possible (e.g., text sources, images, audio, video, etc.).
• However, also require them to properly cite and provide a statement for each source or element justifying its inclusion based on copyright compliance (e.g., evidence of permission, explanation that the work is in the public domain or allowable under Fair Use, etc.). You can even stipulate that projects without much available multimedia elements can salvage their grade by presenting evidence that permission was requested and denied.

Click here for a more detailed lesson plan.