Faculty Resources - University of New England

We often view copyright as a nuisance, and it may be in certain instances. But along with protecting the rights of the owners and creators of intellectual property, copyright provides for rights of users to view, distribute, modify and do other things with certain materials for a fee or free of charge, such as under Fair Use.

What is Fair Use?

We often view copyright as a nuisance, and it may be in certain instances. But along with protecting the rights of the owners and creators of intellectual property, copyright provides for rights of users to view, distribute, modify and do other things with certain materials for a fee or free of charge (such as under Fair Use).

Fair Use guidelines start with the premise that materials are used for educational purposes, and then considers several factors to establish whether such use is warranted.

Textbooks | Video | Pictures

Well, we are no strangers to taking advantage of efficiencies, so we are proudly presenting someone else’s handiwork here, for you may find it hugely helpful.

This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education explains how to filter your image search results in Google Search based on rights to reuse. As some of your current courses are moving into a project work phase, you are encouraged to use other people’s digital property responsibly.*

Additionally, you can also use Creative Commons Search service, and to learn more, check out this article.

It’s amazing how generous people can be with their creations! Pixabay is a website which hosts and allows you to download high-quality images that you can use and reuse any way you want! They don’t even require attribution, although that is always nice to mention. If your students are creating web pages or any other publishable materials, they may want to explore this site. The only caution is that you will also see “sponsored images” – they are clearly marked, have a watermark, and are NOT free, but they already went out of their way to make it very obvious, so there is really no confusing them!

It is important to recognize that the online classroom is, in fact, a classroom, and certain behaviors are expected when you communicate with both your peers and your instructors.

Writing will be your primary means of communication in your online courses. You may be assigned videos and screencast presentation projects on occasion, but these mediums will also expect you to follow the rules of professionalism and etiquette – so it is important to know what is expected of you as a graduate-level student.

It is in this context that we’ve decided to share with you some of the great online resources for finding images that are in the public domain. These could be useful for online instructors looking to spice up their course announcements with an image or two, or even for when the explanation of a concept is simply much more easily made with supplemental visuals. Students, as well, should be more aware of the wealth within the public domain, as it is essentially an online library of images entirely at their fingertips.

SafeAssign compares submitted assignments against a set of academic papers to identify areas of overlap between the submitted assignment and existing works. SafeAssign originality reports provide detailed information about the matches found between a student’s submitted paper and existing sources. Both instructors and students can use the report to review assignment submissions for originality and create opportunities to identify how to properly attribute sources.