While this course provides information about copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons, and suggests some best practices for using them, it does not apply this information to a specific situation and does not constitute legal advice. Please consult an attorney if you would like specific legal advice about your rights, obligations, or individual situation regarding these laws.

Do any of those scenarios sound familiar?

• You are shooting a video to fundraise for a class trip. Can you use a Bruno Mars song for the intro? 
• You want to create an infographic to share with your class on local plants and insects. Can you screengrab a picture from the National Geographic website? 
• Should you display on the smartboard a silly meme that was created using ChatGPT? 

If you include media in your teaching that someone else made you will need to take into account...cue ominous music… copyright law. Copyright is tricky to navigate, but there are ways to make sure you choose material you have permission to use. For example, some materials are under a Creative Commons license, or part of the public domain, or generated by an AI chatbot. But how can you figure out what is what?

Why take this course?

• You want to learn how to navigate copyright law in order to know what your rights are as a creator
• You are wondering about whether you and your students can use media generated by AI
• You are interested in using work or media created by someone else for instruction, but need to know best practices, tips and tricks for how to do so
• You are curious about Creative Commons (CC) licensed work and how to use it responsibly
• You need help finding openly licensed media like photos, music and video

Wherever you are at in your copyright and media journey, this course is for you!

A Note about Generative AI Terminology Used in This Course

There is a lot of technical jargon associated with Generative Artificial Intelligence (aka “GenAI”). In this course, we will refer to tools like ChatGPT and Gemini using the term “AI chatbot” or simply “chatbot.” While there are more technically accurate terms, we believe that “chatbot” most clearly describes how you and students will be engaging with these GenAI tools: through text prompts followed up by responses from the platform. These might be in the form of text, images, or even full video, depending on the prompt and the tool.

 More About This Course

This course is divided into lessons that are a combination of text, images, videos and other interactive elements. There are several quizzes that you will need to pass in order to demonstrate you understand the content and complete the course.

You can go through the course at whatever pace makes sense for you, and review anything afterwards that you might have missed. In order to receive a certificate of completion, you will need to pass all of the quizzes and complete all of the course lessons.