Fair Use and Open Education

This project aims to evaluate the perception of copyright related barriers to the creation of open educational resources (OER) that contain third party materials, such as quotations, excerpts, photographs and illustrations. Our preliminary discussions indicate that there are significant areas of practice where increased understanding and confidence about when and how fair use permits the use of these third party materials would expand the types of OER created and improve their instructional value. We anticipate working with authors, teachers, professors, instructional designers, librarians, and others to draft a best practices in fair use for open educational resources to document the best practices in this professional community.