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Quick copyright and remote teaching tips

There may be pedagogical and technical issues that make the shift from in-person to online teaching a challenge but for once, copyright is not a significant additional area of worry!

Key points to remember

  1. Most of the legal issues are the same whether the teaching is done in person or online.  

  1. If it was okay to do in class, it is often okay to do online – especially when your online access is limited to the same enrolled students.  

  1. You can continue to apply the University of Toronto’s Fair Dealing Guidelines. 

Additional advice

  • Use university password-protected systems like Quercus to make material available to your students.  

  • Post your in-class slides to Quercus. Slides provided by textbook publishers can almost always be used, according to their Terms of Use. 

  • Course readings rules for print and online posting to Quercus are similar. Familiarize yourself with the University of Toronto's Fair Dealing Guidelines, link to resources in the UTL collection, or link out to Internet content. 

  • Course Reserves and Syllabus Service staff can help you copyright check readings, create links to and acquire ebooks and journal articles and more. Staff can also acquire additional licenses if necessary. Contact the Syllabus Service at syllabus.service@library.utoronto.ca.  

  • Your Liaison Librarian may be able to help you find alternative content, and can also help you find openly licensed teaching materials like Open Educational Resources (OER). 

  • Use phone apps like Genius Scan or Adobe Scan to easily scan to post print materials to Quercus in keeping with the University of Toronto Fair Dealing Guidelines.  Make scanned PDF files more accessible for your students by using an optical character recognition (OCR) online tool to convert "non-selectable" text files into more accessible versions. 

  • Sharing audiovisual material like films and audio files is more complex. But remember you can still link to legally posted online content (from YouTube etc.). UTL has has licensed audio-visual resources that you may link to. Standard commercial streaming options like Netflix, Crave or Disney+ that students may also subscribe to can be an option – though some students may not have access to those services. Copyright exception s. 30.01 can also apply - contact  copyright@library.utoronto.ca if you need help to implement this copyright exception as there are rules that need to be followed to use it.  

More information

Please consult the Rapidly Shifting your Course from In-Person to Online: Copyright Considerations for more in-depth discussion.

This material has been adapted from the University of Minnesota’s Rapidly shifting your course from in-person to online and from material provided by Ryerson University Library and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL).