The following information is meant as best practices and guidelines for instructors and does not take the place of legal counsel. For more information on the specifics of copyright law, please go to the Copyright Act of Canada.
It is your legal and moral responsibility to follow the rules governed by the Canadian Copyright Act and your contractual obligation to the college
You are setting an example for the students to follow.
You are making life easier for those who come after and inherit your course material (if future instructors don’t know where something comes from, they cannot continue to use it.)
You must give proper credit for other people’s work.
So that your readers/viewers can locate the source for themselves for further information or study purposes.
Above all else, cite your sources!
It doesn’t matter if something is in the public domain or creative commons, Open Access/Open Education Resource, or it falls under fair dealing, is freely available online, or you have permission from the copyright holder, you MUST cite your source!!!
To be able to legally use an outside source, your use of the material must fall under fair dealing, or be in the public domain or an Open Access/Open Education Resource, or you have written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright: the legal right of a creator of a work or the corporation who sponsored the work to copy, use, print or make publicly available as they choose
Copyright holder - the person or organization that holds the rights to publish/use/copy a particular work. In this case, any work (photo, diagram, etc.) created for classes at the college belongs to the college, not the instructor, unless a prior arrangement has been made.
Fair dealing - information shared for the purpose of study/education is considered fair dealing. However, there are limits as to what is considered fair.
Fair use - American version of fair dealing.
Cite - indicate that the information either quoted or referred to is from an outside source
Citation/in-text citation: use the author’s last name followed by the publication year, either as part of the narrative of the text, or in parentheses after the information you are borrowing. For example (Jones, 1984).
Reference: This is a list of all of the resources that you have referred to, either at the end of the day's lesson/slide/handout, or in a separate section at the end of your Moodle course.
Public domain - Copyright of a work continues for 50 years after the death of the creator (70 years in the US). After that time, the work may be used/reproduced without permission, but still using full citations!
Creative commons - Creative commons is an alternative to copyright ,in which the creator allows for reproduction of the work with fewer restrictions. There are several designations under creative commons
OER - Open Education Resource - a work created for the purpose of education for which the copyright holder allows the user to print, distribute, and in some cases modify, for the purpose of education
Creative Commons licenses by Foter (CC-BY-SA)(2015)
(By the way, Foter has some amazing infographics to make all aspects of citing items under creative commons incredibly clear.)
To make things easier, on your title slide/page you may write: “Unless otherwise specified, all content in this document/presentation is under Olds College copyright.” If you wish to give credit to the individual who took the photo or created the graph, etc. feel free to do so, but it is not necessary if the copyright belongs to Olds College.
For a complete and detailed guide on how to format citations and references, please check out the Olds College Library’s Research Guide on APA Citations. OR
You can use a citation generator, such as Mendeley, Zotero, NC State Citation Builder, Citation Machine or other online citation generator of your choice to format your list of references.
Whether you are using slides, images, graphs, diagrams, illustrations, video clips, or sound clips, if the work is someone else’s, living or dead, you must give them the credit they deserve by providing proper attribution in the form of citations.
