Lecture capture: risky business or evolving open practice?

It’s been a busy end to the year, with Chris presenting at the Learning On Screen AGM on 2nd December and then us both presenting yesterday at the final Heron User Group meeting on the lecture recording survey we recently carried out. The slides are available but we were delighted to also be featured last week in the Times Higher Education Supplement, where they ran a short story on how universities are uncertain about lecture recording copyright issues. I’m not sure I would agree that universities are uncertain, but lecture recording certainly raises a lot of copyright and IPR issues, which do need to be resolved and the guidance that is provided to staff needs to be timely, clear and supportive. We hope to be able to work with other copyright officers to develop some good practice over issues such as the inclusion of images, and short video clips in recorded lectures. That guidance needs to be practical when it comes to interpreting the law and the copyright exception, Illustration for Instruction. It was useful to have our colleagues from CLA hear the presentation yesterday and we look forward to discussing this with them further in the new year.