Copyright & Remote Instruction

Pedagogical and technical issues may make the shift from in-person to remote instruction a challenge but copyright concerns should not be a significant barrier!

Key points to remember

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

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

  3. You can continue to apply the Queen’s Fair Dealing Policy.   

Quick guide

  • Use university password-protected systems like OnQ to make material available to your students, and use the tools outlined on the Connecting, Collaborating, and Teaching Remotely page to deliver lectures with copyrighted content.

  • Post your in-class slides to OnQ. 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 OnQ are similar. Either use the guidelines in the Queen’s Fair Dealing Policy, link to electronic material available in the Queen’s University Library collection, or link out to Internet content.

  • The Copyright Advisory Office can help you copyright check readings, create links to ebooks and journal articles and more. 

  • Your Subject Librarian may be able to help you find alternative content, and Queen’s University Library has a large collection of online journals and ebooks that can help support online learning. Your librarian 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 OnQ within the limits allowed by theQueen’s Fair Dealing Policy. 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.). Queen’s University Library has a collection of streaming databases that you may link to. Standard commercial streaming options like Netflix, Crave or Disney Plus that students may also subscribe to can be an option – though some students may not have access to those services. 

More information

For more infomation please see our Detailed Information on Copyright & Remote Instruction page.

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