In this blog post, Greg Walters, who is the Communications Officer of the newly formed Copyright and Online Learning Special Interest Group (CoOL SIG), discusses the group’s background and how to become part of this growing community of practice.
Background of Special Interest Group
The Copyright and Online Learning Special Interest Group (CoOL SIG) was formed in November 2020 and is chaired by Chris Morrison (University of Kent) and Dr Jane Secker (City, University of London). The group focusses on copyright issues relating to online learning, digital education and learning technology. Due to the pandemic, this niche area experienced an exponential growth from March 2020 in terms of the number of queries received via the Jisc LIS-Copyseek mailing list (managed by Jane and Chris), as learning primarily shifted to an online format across the educational sector.
The remit of the group is to operate as a community of practice which helps support international, regional, or institutional communities of practice in the fields of copyright, online learning and learning technology. This will help encourage the exchange of knowledge and good practice, which is important as copyright, can be an ambiguous area with no simple” right” or “wrong” answers. Operating in this capacity will enable the development of expertise in areas relating to the group’s remit and advocate for “Copyright Literacy” to be employed as this practice encourages the ethical creation and use of copyright material.
Get Involved
Copyright in relation to online learning, is growing and relevant area and if you are interested in signing up to become a member of our inclusive and exciting community then please click on the link below.
Join the Copyright and Online Learning SIG
This group welcomes and encourages, staff from varying backgrounds to sign up, and is also keen to extend the invitation to Learning Technologists/e-Learning Developers as well anyone else interested in copyright and online learning.
Once you have signed up to become a member of the CoOL SIG, you will also receive our quarterly newsletter, which will keep you up to date with the group’s activities and upcoming events.
We also have a Twitter account (@ALTCoOLSIG), where you can see our newly designed logo and keep up to date with up to the minute news.
Going forward the group plan on building on the existing ALT fortnightly webinars (hosted by Jane and Chris) and will deliver a programme of events. These will include workshops, seminars and other awareness raising events and we plan to join international colleagues in celebrating Fair Use/Fair Dealing week for the first time in the UK next February.
The committee has set up working groups to further investigate the following key areas, which relate to the remit of the group:
- Accessibility and copyright
- Copyright and ethics
- Copyright education and teaching resources
- Codes of Fair Practice – audio-visual works
- Other Sectors, Collaboration and Partnerships
- International representation and networking
We look forward to welcoming you into our group and joining one of the working groups. The CoOL SIG has an ethos of openness and sharing and is a way of learning more about an area of copyright and meeting like-minded colleagues. We also hope it will be a networking opportunity, as we build links between other professional groups both within the ALT community and more broadly. The group aims to be a forum for exchanging knowledge and sharing good practice. We look forward to hearing from you!