One of the things I (supposedly) do when not tinkering with Web 2.0 toys is look after an introductory OU short course on robotics.
Robotics as a subject area is pretty well suited to making reuse of 3rd party content to illustrate points, especially in an online course: movies and images are order of the day, as you might imagine:
The question is, could I legitimately embed a youTube movie (assuming I could verify that it was a 'legitimately' uploaded video, of course;-) in course materials that are only viewable by registered (i.e. fee paying) students?
The youTube T&C states:
F. YouTube permits you to link to materials on the Website for personal, non-commercial purposes only. In addition, YouTube provides an "Embeddable Player" feature, which you may incorporate into your own personal, non-commercial websites for use in accessing the materials on the Website, provided that you include a prominent link back to the YouTube website on the pages containing the Embeddable Player. YouTube reserves the right to discontinue any aspect of the YouTube Website at any time.
So is an OU online course a commercial service? Can I embed a movie under the above condition or not?
If anyone is has tried to get youTube movies embedded in an online course and/or has taken advice from their rights department on this topic (as I am about tto do) I'd be interested in hearing how you got on...
Similarly, if anyone is using any third party service as an integral part of their course (flickr, maybe?), how did you get on?
I know there were discussions here at the OU about the possibility of getting students to use flickr in our new Digital Photography short course, with an OU developed front end plugged into the flickr API.
But for whatever reason, that route wasn't taken and instead a flickr clone was built in-house. (I'm not sure what sort of export options or sharing support/API is available though? In the time available for development, I'd guess flickr offers more... and I don't know whether the storage space is capped, either?)
Whilst rights aren't my strong thing, I could imagine that the following would be treated differently:
1) a course team/instructor getting a youTube movie (or flickr slideshow etc.) embedded in some formally delivered elearning materials;
2) a student embedding a youTube movie in a personal, course related blog post using a blogging system provided by their HEI to support their studies.
I don't know if things get trickier if, in the second case, the blog post is only viewable behind an HEI firewall/student registration required "paywall", compared to a situation where the blog is public?
Just by the by, this idea of PLE vs VLE published content ties in with the String'n'Glue Learning Environment appproach, as well as the notion of "distributed content publishing": "The challenge with the distributed content model (the notion that educational content comes to the learner's space, rather than the learner coming to a space decided by the educational facility) is that it runs against the in-grained assumptions of our value point in higher education or corporate environments."]
I have to admit that inspiration deserts me at the moment about where to go for advice on the issue of "can I/can't I embed 3rd party widget serving content" outside of the OU, (in part given I couldn't find any way of mailing youTube support;-)? JISC (err... which bit?)? CETIS (because this is all about reuse, right?;-)?
PS as well as looking for tales about using flickr'n'youTube like content/services as an integral part of an elearning course, I also need to play catch-up with how social bookmarking is being used for real in K12-HEI education by the students. Any and all pointers, war stories etc. appreciated - feel free to tag stuff for me (psychemedia) on delicious...;-0
PS I just spotted over on the Google Blog that presentations will soon be added to the Google docs'n'spreadsheets mix...
Posted by ajh59 at April 17, 2007 09:21 PM