In today’s digital world, students could potentially gain access to all required course readings without ever spending a penny.Since the University instituted Moodle as its only course management system this semester, more professors are posting excerpts and chapters from books, handbooks and other works like articles, poems and online materials.While posting texts helps students’ wallets and acts as a handy tool, one problem that arises is copyright law.There is an exemption in the copyright law for the limited use of copyrighted material in education, but the distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined.”Professors have to be aware the rules don’t change significantly just because the material is distributed on Moodle as opposed to the classroom,” said Louis Day, mass communication professor.The law does not define a specific number of words, lines or notes that may be used in a classroom without permission.”There is no quantitative measure written into the law that covers all works, and it would be hard because there are so many different works out there,” Day said. “The question is if it is fair use and how much you can use.”Copying parts of copyrighted works, like paragraphs, for education purposes qualifies as fair use. But copying an entire chapter may be questionable.”Copying a couple of pages of a 1,000 page novel is not very substantial,” Day said. “But copying four lines out of a 16 line poem is 25 percent, so that’s a lot.”Though there is no set measure of what is legal or not, different organizations produce guidelines on what they believe is legitimate. Congress developed guidelines, but they were never written into the law, Day said.”My publisher told me that I could not quote more than 50 words from any source,” Day said. “I have no idea where that [number] came from, but if I’m quoting from a 10,000 word piece, 50 words is just a drop in the bucket.”The rules are vague and monitoring Moodle would be difficult for the University and time consuming for the publishers. Professors must rely on common sense to decide what is fair use and what is infringement, Day said.Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, English professor and Communication across the Curriculum director, requires her students to purchase one textbook each semester. But because she can’t find one textbook containing all the information students need, she often posts readings online to supplement the text.”You have to be careful about what is fair use for educational purposes,” Bridwell-Bowles said. “But if I find one article here and one article there, and it’s relevant to my classroom, then I post it on Moodle.”Since posting to Moodle is more economical for students, Bridwell-Bowles posts two or three articles a week in addition to scanning in textbook excerpts.”I’m careful about not scanning too much and following those fair use policies,” she said. “I’m not copying more than 10 pages out of a 300 page textbook.”Bridwell-Bowles said she draws from about 50 different textbooks a semester.”This is not new for me,” she said. “I’ve been supplementing textbooks my whole career.”But Bridwell-Bowles said if she needed to copy a large section of a textbook, she would require students to purchase it instead.”I’m actually the editor of a couple of textbooks myself, and I wouldn’t want people copying,” she said. “If they’re going to use a great deal of what I’ve put together, I’d appreciate it if they’d have the students buy it.”Bridwell-Bowles said a statement to faculty about violating copyrights could be useful when posting to Moodle.”I think [posting online] is a trend,” Bridwell-Bowles said. “We’re all going in that direction because of cost.”Rachel Dowty, disaster management professor, said she also uses Moodle to post the course syllabus and readings.”I prefer to draw materials from a variety of sources,” she said. “It helps consolidate these sources where students can access them.”Dowty said students used to rely on the library reserves, and students were forced to read course materials professors kept on file at the library.”The reliability of Moodle access and functionality has been an issue at times, but I still think it beats having to wait in line for library reserves,” Dowty said.——Contact Leslie Presnall at [email protected]