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["John Casey" <John.Casey AT uhi.ac.uk>]

Request for Comment and Feedback

 

The TrustDR project, funded by the JISC in the UK, is tasked with devising some practical solutions to the problem of managing IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) in e-learning materials – especially in the context of institutional repositories of learning objects. To do this the project is working its way through a demanding problem area that includes educational, technical, legal, cultural, political and organisational issues. The project team have decided that the right approach to this task is that of taking a critical and creative attitude to problem solving. The work of the first half of the project is now publicly available for comment, we would really value your feedback about the documents you can find at this website:

 

http://www.uhi.ac.uk/lis/projects/trustdr/work_in_progress.html

 

 

Some of our emerging conclusions are listed below:

 

It is understandable that many people associate DRM (Digital Rights Management) just with technology (digital), however it is our view that most of the work involved is legal and cultural (rights management). In this domain it would be very, very easy to spend a lot of money on useless (and pointless) technical measures. We propose that most of what we need can be (and needs to be) achieved with ‘lo-tech and no-tech' solutions.

 

The law is not as restrictive as many people think, we advocate an approach that says “what do we want to do?” not “what do we have to do?”

 

The TrustDR project final outputs aim to give users the ability to tell their lawyers what to do and to tell their IT support people what they have to do to make this work.

 

As with DRM in any industry it is important to understand the real nature of the business and how it works, in our case we need to clearly understand the  ‘business of e-learning’ and the true role of learning materials in education. If this means upsetting a few cherished myths then so much the better.

 

E-learning, as it is currently practised, continues to fail to reach its potential, mostly for cultural and organisational reasons. Tackling the legal issues in learning materials can be a powerful way of transforming the educational workplace to make better use of e-learning.

John Casey
Learning Materials Manager
TrustDR JISC Project Manager
UHI Millennium Institute
Room 145, Perth College, Perth, PH1 2NX,
Scotland
UK

e-mail: john.casey AT uhi.ac.uk
Tel: 01738 877213
Mob: 07796930031
Fax: