Expectations / Should I take this course?

This course requires between 4- 6 hours  per week in class-related work. This is a serious commitment - but it will be rewarding. It is a peer to peer learning experience. You won't learn anything if you don't share your understandings with others. For that reason all participants will be expected to share your answers to questions. You will retain copyright to your answers and can re-use them how you want. P2PU plans to offer this course in future with a focus on specific jurisdictions where possible. We'd like to use student contributions so request that you re-license them under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike licence - what this means is something you will learn during the course.

How is the course delivered?

The Copyright 4 Educators course is not taught, it is facilitated by the course leader- Delia Browne.

The course is student participation focused. Students are divided into small groups of four. Each group is responsible for organising their online communications/discussions (via email, Google docs, Skype, tokbox etc) and jointly submits answers to the case scenarios and assignments.

The course leader basically reviews the student group work that has been posted to the blog and provide comments where they have gone wrong.  As stated above, the leaders act as facilitators rather than traditional teachers.  The aim is to learn about copyright by completing practical case studies.

Group Assignments

Each group is required to submit a group answer to three case studies.  Each group has two weeks to submit their group answer to each case study. See Timetable below.

Timetable

1.  26 January 2011: Orientation Week

Students introduce themselves to each other and acquaint themselves with the website and ICT Tools needed to collaborate and work together. Students agree to either work via wiki, google groups or document or some other asynchronous method. See Communication and Collaborative Working Tools below

2. 2 February 2011 Student Groups start working on the first case study. 

3. Case Studies due dates:

    * Case Study 1 - due 16 February 2011

    * Case Study 2 - due 2 March 2011

    * Case Study 3 - due 16 March 2011

Group Assignments

Each group must submit a group answer to each of the case studies by the due dates set out above. Each case study has a list of readings and resources that may assist you in answering the case scenario questions.  It also has a list of keywords indicating the topics the week is intended to cover. Remember to focus on those topics when answering the questions - don't feel like you need to skip ahead and become an expert in copyright in the first few weeks of the course. 

The Group answer should demonstrate your understanding of the assigned reading material and should include original thoughts and synthesis. Don't just summarize readings. Making connections between the week's readings and either previous readings or previous blogging (of your own or of other students!) is strongly encouraged. 

Only answer the questions in relation to the case study/scenario. Do not answer the questions for understanding. Use those questions to assist you in your learning and discussions with group members.

In addition, each group must provide a short assessment of the other groups’ answers. This means you must review the other groups answers to the case studies.

How to get started?

By now you will have been allocated a group colour indicating the student group you have been placed in. Please contact your group members and introduce yourself.

We suggest a different student take responsibility for starting the weekly discussion and submitting the final answer and group assessment of the other groups' answer for each week.

You may wish to allocate particular questions to different members to provide a first draft for review and comment.  At different times and due to differing workloads, some group members may have less time to work on that assignment. Liaise with your group members if you are finding it difficult to participate at any time. They may be willing to do more work for that assignment if you do more work for the next assignment.

Communication and collaborative working tools

The purpose of P2P University is to facilitate peer-supported learning. As such, we strongly encourage each group to take advantage of the many collaborative tools available online.

However, how you choose to do so is up to you. You may wish to set up a space for group discussion in the course page or set up a wiki for collaborative works. You may wish to draft collaboratively using google.docs. You may wish to hold real time discussions using skype or tokbox or other communication tools

See links http://wiki.p2pu.org/synchronous-meetings and http://wiki.p2pu.org/toolbox

How to post the final group answer

See Forum for further instructions on how to upload the group answer to the case studies.