Copyright Issues in Teaching with Technology

Use of Student Intellectual Property
Works created by Dakota Wesleyan University students for the purposes of fulfilling class assignments or degree requirements are considered to be the intellectual property of their student creators, who retain ownership. Ownership of works created by student groups working collaboratively is shared among the group members.

Faculty members sometimes wish to display student works in their classes, either current or subsequent, within a face-to-face class or via some electronic means such as MyWeb or in the Jenzabar course management system. According to the copyright statute, the rights holder has the exclusive right to display the work. If faculty intend to display student works in this manner, students should be notified in the course syllabus or assignment instructions, and they should be given an opportunity to request that their works not be displayed. For example, verbiage similar to this can be used:

Your paper will be posted on the course web site on Jenzabar so that your fellow students can benefit from your work. This is roughly the equivalent of making a report in a conventional face-to-face class. If you have an intellectual property problem with that, contact your instructor to state that your work cannot be displayed. If your work is posted, it is anticipated that others will download it for future reference, and that they will respect your intellectual property.

In this way, you can give your students the opportunity to “opt out”. A release form may be used by faculty in lieu of syllabus notification, as long as the form is signed by the students prior to display of their works. This form of permission may be preferable, since it requires an overt release on the part of the students whose work would be displayed, rather than an implied, by-default release.

If work of former students is to be displayed to a current class, make sure that you obtain permission from those students in writing and specify the conditions. Do this before you reveal the work to your current students.

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