When assessing your students' workload remember to take into account the study guide, the activities and the textbook or readings.

All those articles, which seem interesting and useful to you, can amount to an overwhelming burden of reading for your students.

In education quality should be more important than quantity. Much of the information and knowledge contained in educational courses becomes outdated before too long. Much is never used by students. In an era of rapid social and technological change students benefit more from learning how to become independent learners than from being stuffed with information.

In the next activity you are asked to select the textbook or readings for your course. When you do this make sure that you estimate the time it will take your students to read all the material!

Selecting Books or Readings

You now come to an important decision. You need to select the books and/or readings to provide the main source of content.

Rowntree provides a valuable set of guidelines (figure 5.1) for evaluating reading materials. Treat the guidelines as a measure of how much materials will have to be adapted if used with a study guide. For example, when using the criterion "teaching approach", few textbooks will provide activities or exercises to allow the student to interact with the materials. However you can provide these in your study guide. You are unlikely to find perfect materials so ask yourself whether the deficiencies can be rectified in your study guide in an efficient way.

Writing Style or Readability

If you wish to assess reading matter in a more detailed way, then it is worth skimming through Rowntree's chapter 10, entitled "Making your lesson readable". The criteria for plain conversational writing can be used to assess possible books.

You could also try one of the readability tests on potential books (pp. 230-231). Do not take the results too literally. Scientific texts can score poorly on the Fog Index because many of the technical words are long. However if the terms are used repeatedly and are well defined when first met, they may not present reading difficulties.

It is easy to get a low Fog Index. You use short sentences. You do that all the time. You never use long words. It does not make for easy reading. In fact reading is difficult!

Copyright Permission

Obtaining copyright permission can be a lengthy process so start early or permission might not come through before the beginning of the course. If a copyright owner refuses permission or demands an exorbitant fee it is better to know early on, so that alternative readings can be found.

The process of obtaining permission can be particularly lengthy if you have trouble locating the copyright owner. Addresses can change and it is not always clear from a book or journal who owns the copyright. It can take two or three letters before a satisfactory reply is received.

Rowntree covers

• copyright material
• infringement
• ownership of copyright
• obtaining permission
• protection of copyright.

It is worth strengthening the third point on page 372. Many of the larger publishers automatically ask for details such as:

• print run
• intended use
• distribution
• whether reprints will be made.

It can save a letter if you give the information to start with. You are less likely to be charged a fee if the copied material is part of a free course for a small number of underprivileged students in your home town, than if it is going in an expensive book with worldwide sales. So if you are in the home town category make sure you tell the copyright owner.

If you obtain permission to copy any material you reproduce, then you are safe as long as you stick to any conditions imposed by the copyright owner. There are some rights to make copies without having obtained permission. The chief of is the fair dealing right to copy insubstantial portions. In addition there are now provisions for educational institutions to make copies, for student use, which are, covered by a standard license fee payment

I have no intention of offering advice on the use of these provisions. They can make your task much easier but copyright legislation varies from country to country and changes to legislation occur in order to keep pace with advances in technologies, such as video recorders and computers. Each of the acts are replete with phrases such as substantial portion or fair dealing which need careful interpretation in the light of test cases.

The references cited below will be of some help, but the best advice is:

Copyright legislation affects every educational institution so most have assigned someone to oversee the operation of copyright procedures. Most organisations have well established procedures in place.

Moore, L.G. (1987)
The Australian law of copyright and its application to distance education.
Distance Education, 8, 1, 18-37.

Unlike most works on copyright this article is easy to read. If you are involved in distance education in Australia it is highly recommended.

Lahore, J. (1979)
Intellectual property in Australia
Sydney: Butterworths.

A more comprehensive guide to Australian copyright legislation.