MADE for U of T | Ep. 02 | Cheryl Lee

Listen to the podcast: Learning about image rights with Cheryl Lee

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Cheryl Lee (CL): Good morning, my name is Cheryl.  So I recently joined the EdTech Office as the Educational Graphic and Media Developer I’ve been working as a medical illustrator and a learning experience designer in my past life, just before.  Since starting at EdTech I’ve been working on Open Educational Projects such as Climate Science and Engineering.  And we're just wrapping up and I just want to reiterate that I am by no means an expert in the world of copyright, but I just wanted to share what I have learned to really spark the conversations within the MADE community and then you know, we can learn from each other's experiences, what we went through, and I think that will just save us time.  And that's the other thing I learned like; how little time we have as educational developers and that actually inspire me to start my own Open Source project to share my illustration, so that we, as a collective, can save time and make better, higher quality educational pieces.

Inga Breede (IB): What can you tell us what did you know about the world of image usage rights before starting these projects?

CL: So, before starting these my knowledge about image right was, I would say very limited.  It was more like black and white; you either purchased the rights to use it, or you draw it yourself if you don't have the copyrigh.  Never really explored the Gray zone, there is about the you know the how there is educational exceptions and image rights.  And I was really scared to get my feet wet.  I just stayed away as much as I can, because, fortunately, I have the ability to draw.  And that's where I was able to create them myself but yeah before coming on board with these Open Source projects, I had very limited knowledge about image rights.

IB: What resources, did you use to gain more knowledge, for example, what websites or which U of T communities, did you reach out to?  Did you go to any webinar events?

CL: When I learned that for educational purposes fair dealings exists, there's a lot that you can do as an educational creator to sort of use the copyright resources only because to save time and you know in this world, when we are making educational product it's very hard to not come across another copyrighted material that you may feel the need to use or may it may be appropriate or necessary and that's why those educational exceptions are there and to learn more about that first I’m going to enter who then guided me to Angela Henshilwood, who's the head librarian at the Engineering library and from there, my journey came across the copyright and fair dealings documents provided and created by the U of T scholarly communications and the Copyright Office and then they led me to their dealings week in Canada.  I think it was just end of February, so a couple weeks ago and we had very nice seminars from the industry experts in copyright and fair feeling in VR.  They discussed the students perspective because students create work too that's often educational and another dealings champion, Carys J. Craig, she gave her talk about the code of best practices when it comes to using fair dealing in open educational media.

IB: And how did you even find out about the fair dealings week?

CL: So I went down my rabbit hole, trying to learn more about what does fair dealing even mean you know, like is it still a copyright infringement like is it okay to do that?  Is it like absolutely not? I just wanted to learn more about it and I Googled “fair dealing” because I heard the term “fair use,” used around especially on YouTube.  But I wasn't familiar with fair dealing and that's our copyright terminology for fair use in Canada, but it's a little bit different in those sense that we do have our own exceptions and guideline written about their dealings.

IB: You bring up a good point that, at least in our case it's really important, if you are finding resources or events, that they are Canadian focused, because there are different rules, there are different terminologies versus the United States.  In the events that you attended and the people that you reached out to what was the most surprising thing you learned and what is still in the grey zone?

CL: So again, because I’m not the expert, I feel, like everything is still in the green zone!  I always email my contact at the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office and say “Okay, is this fair dealings?” I always have her double check.  What was actually surprising for me is the best practice guide is really helpful because it goes by, case by case and it gives you like a case study on what you can do and what the experts recommend that you do and when it comes to fair dealings and fair use.  But what I found surprising in that document was that they actually recommend that you embed the copyrighted material in your open educational resource.  That was really surprising to me because I would often link out instead of embedding it in my own project to go about the copyright, but their suggestion was if you know you are going to spend this time to work on this Open educational resource and you are going to do your due diligence, to make it accessible and make it the best educational project that you can that it makes sense that you then include the learning experience of using that copyrighted material, because there was a reason that you chose to include a copyrighted material in the first place.  It had a really good pedagogical use case right, so what would happen if you linked out and then the link is broken?  What happens to the educational experience? So that's what I found really surprising in the best practices document.  But have I done it myself?  No, not yet!  And, and I think, for me, I would still double check with scholarly communications.

IB: What is one tip you would give to an educational designer before they begin building out content for an instructor?

CL: So, like my one question is, do you have a citation for all the images that you used?  That will be my question as it is really time consuming to do a reverse image search on the images to find let alone to track down all the creators and sources, but if you have even a link then it will then give me the ability to look up their name look up their licensing if it's available, and then you can check it against.  But truly if there's no license but you do want to use it, then I double check with the Copyright Office.  And then, there's another call on just should I just recreated That would be my other last resort.

IB: Thank you, Cheryl, for answering those questions and doing this interview today, and thanks to everyone for attending this session.  I hope everyone has a great day today and a great rest of the week.  Bye everyone!

CL: Thank you, bye!

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