What do we mean by reuse and repurpose?
One of the more surprising findings from the reproduce projects has been the absence of a consistent understanding of ‘reuse’ and ‘repurposing’ of digital content.
For JISC and JISC Collections it was always meant to mean a very active engagement with that content, disaggregating, copying, pasting, embedding, adapting and generally taking parts of the content and recontextualising it to create new learning materials.
We knew that from a rights clearance perspective this could be a tall order - would rights holders grant us a very wide range of permissions? What about moral rights? etc.
But the whole idea was to test the issues in a real world environment, work through them and make recommendations for the future.
As it turns out though this isn’t the same meaning as many as the projects have. For them the reuse is in the adoption of existing content and reusing that same content in a different context. As such the content remains the same, but the context in which it is taught is repurposed. This means that they are linking to content, rather than downloading it and adapting the existing content or taking only a part of it and including that in a new learning material.
Now it would appear that this is much closer to standard academic practice than JISC’s interpretation, and in many ways reflects teaching practice as it has always been.
Copyright has been a contributing factor to these practices since educators will wish to avoid any risk of contravening copyright.
If this is the case how then can we overcome it and at the very least encourage educators to make more use of third party content in the development of new learning materials? It seems to me that thinking practically there are two options:
1. Make sure that when content is made available on the web there is clear information attached to it about what can be done in an educational context - Creative Commons provides an example of how this can be achieved - not necessarily through the adoption of CC licences (though this will be part of it) - but through the clear presentation of information on what can and can’t be done.
2. Have much greater awareness of/availability of the in house assistance available to educators in the identification of suitable content, the permissions that content has associated with it, what permissions need to be cleared and finally whether or not it is going to be practical or achievable to clear those rights in the required time frames and costs.