With apologies for the delay in publishing this report which was compiled in January 2026.

Co-Chair’s Welcome and Update

Welcome to the fifth annual report of the Copyright and Online Learning (CoOL) SIG of the Association of Learning Technology. The CoOL SIG was formed in November 2020, and this report covers the period January to December 2025. We are honoured to continue serving  as the Co-Chairs of  this group, and the report outlines the achievements of the community over the last 12 months. Once again, the CoOL SIG’s activities have centred on our Copyright and Online Learning webinars; however, we have also worked on various projects and initiatives outlined in more detail below.

We have continued to see interest in copyright and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), and ran two webinars on this topic, including a closed session to support the community writing a response to the government’s consultation on copyright and AI. We were delighted to run Icepops in collaboration with the University of Manchester, held at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. 

We’ve served the group as Co-Chairs now for 5 years, and continue to be willing to support a new chair or co-chair if someone comes forward. 

Chris Morrison and Jane Secker ALT CoOL SIG Co-chairs 

Overview of activities 2025

During 2025, the group committee continued to meet regularly (see Appendix 1 for members), held 3 meetings (March, June and December) and an AGM in September at Icepops 2025, which took place at the University of Manchester. We have several working groups to coordinate our activities in the following areas:

• Accessibility and copyright – the group have continued to meet and now has a new Chair, Megan Kilvington. 
• Copyright education and training resources – this group continued to meet to discuss best practice and how to share resources on copyright education. 
• The ALT Ethical framework was launched in 2021, and there is a small working group keeping a watching brief on this and feeding into the developments. 
• Copyright Mentoring Scheme – plans for a mentoring scheme for copyright professionals are well underway, following agreement at the AGM to pursue this. This work is being led by Liesl Rowe and Irene Barranco Garcia and will be launched at a webinar in February 2026. 

Report on events

Copyright and Online Learning Webinars

• Recordings of our webinars continue to be hosted on the ALT YouTube Channel and our website. These webinars now take place on the ALT Zoom platform.
• Number of webinars: 82 in total since March 2020, including 9 webinars held in 2025
• Topics covered: Rights Retention Strategies, Coventry’s journey to using open educational resources, Copyright and AI, copyright and audiovisual works, Becoming a Copyright Specialist, Copyright Anxiety study findings and highlights of Icepops.  

Attendance at the webinars remains steady; we continue to receive suggestions for speakers and already have 3 webinars booked for 2026.

Icepops 2025

The Icepops conference ran at the University of Manchester on 9-10th September 225. The keynote was given by Monica Westin, and our invited speaker was Mat Bancroft from the British Pop Archive. The presentations and further details are available on the Icepops 2025 website. Over 60 people attended the event from over 45 different organisations, and feedback was highly positive. Most delegates were from higher education and national libraries but representatives of CMOs and publishers were also present. Three international delegates attended including one from the USA, Sweden and the Netherlands. Five full delegate places at Icepops 2025 were sponsored by the Copyright Licensing Agency.  

Icepops was once again underwritten financially by the CILIP Information Literacy Group. Tours of the John Rylands Library were held on 10th September 2025, and we ran an AGM for the ALT CoOL SIG. The profit / loss for the event is still to be calculated by the CILIP ILG Treasurer, but there will be  a small profit. 

Other conferences 

Jane and Chris presented on Copyright and Online Learning and the work of the SIG at a number of external conferences, including the following events: 

• University of London RIDE Conference – March 2025
• OIPA AI and Publishing Webinar – June 2025 (Jane)
• Research in Digital Learning in HE Conference – September 2025
• Open Fifth Conference – November 2025 (Jane)

Social Media and Communications 

We retired our Twitter account in 2024 but set up a LinkedIn group for the CoOL SIG in 2025. This group now has 61 followers. We also have a BlueSky account with 57 followers. 

The CoOL SIG JISCmail list now has 236 members, and it is used for all group communication. 

We also continue to use LIS-Copyseek (a closed list with over 600 members) to promote our events and also the Copyrightliteracy.org website. The CoOL SIG has a logo, and t-shirts are available to purchase in the ALT Store. 

Collaboration and networking

The group recognises that there are many existing groups in the copyright space and has sought to  collaborate with as many of these as possible. The organisations include:

• Scottish Confederation of University & Research Libraries (SCURL) – several committee members are also members of the SCURL Copyright and Legal Matters group (although this group has ceased activity in early 2026) 
• LACA (Libraries and Archives Coalition) – Jane Secker has stepped down as a member of LACA and Chris Morrison has now joined this group and keeps them up to date with ALT CoOL SIG activities.
• IFLA. 

Appendix 1: Committee members

Co-Chairs: Jane Secker (City St George’s, University of London) and Chris Morrison (Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford).

Co-Secretary: Kathryn Drumm (City St George’s, University of London).

Marketing and communications officer: Deborah Ferns (University of Strathclyde) and Nikisha Stanton (Defence Academy), Shazia Arif (Brunel University, University of London).

Other Officers: Liesl Rowe (Leeds Beckett University), Chris Jones (University of Reading), Kate Vasili (Middlesex University), Neil Sprunt (University of Manchester), Erica Levi (Coventry University), Caroline Lloyd (University of Nottingham), Bart Meletti (University of Glasgow), Neil McCormick and Irene Barranco Garcia (Imperial College), Megan Kilvington (York St John University), Christine Daouti (UCL) and Keziah Gibbs (University of Essex).