Dive Brief:
- An inaugural survey about the state of digital media in higher education by subscription-based stock video provider VideoBlocks found half of students and faculty respondents consider themselves to be highly digitally literate, but only 14% of faculty and 23% of students think the other group is as well.
- Campus Technology reports that most faculty go outside of university-provided resources to find digital media for their course materials, and many report frustration with a lack of access to digital materials as well as the time it takes to learn new technology.
- The survey data also show more than two-thirds of faculty respondents said they assigned more than three projects that require students to create multimedia, but almost three-quarters said their students are unknowledgeable about the topic of copyright and fair use.
Dive Insight:
Digital media is being used more often by faculty in their lectures and by students as they complete projects for courses that attempt to teach them the skills they’ll need in the workplace. Increased use of video and photos comes with greater temptation to ignore copyright, however. Search engines offer a quick way to find related content and many students and faculty proceed on the assumption that it won’t matter if they incorporate content that isn’t licensed for their use.
VideoBlocks is one service that sells access to footage subscribers are free to use. California Newsreel has a similar business model with a collection of documentaries. And colleges often respond to requests from faculty by reaching out to distributors for permission on a case-by-case basis. In this era of video, all schools should have some system in place to facilitate proper approval for faculty and students.