Berkman Center for Internet & Society

CopyrightX is a twelve-week networked distance-learning course, taught by Professor Terry Fisher, which was offered during Spring of 2013 on the EdX platform and will be offered next in the Spring of 2014.  The course explores the current law of copyright and the ongoing debates concerning how that law should be reformed.  Through a combination of pre-recorded lectures (by Prof. Fisher), live webcasts, and weekly online seminars (led by Harvard Law School teaching fellows), participants in the course examine and assess the ways in which law seeks to stimulate and regulate creative expression.

To access the course materials and links to press coverage, see the CopyrightX Homepage on Terry Fisher’s personal site.

When designing the course, Prof. Fisher and the course team considered ways of improving upon the dominant design features of many emerging MOOCs.  In particular, the team did not want to deploy a "broadcast" or "guru-on-the-mountaintop" model, in which an expert delivers knowledge to large audiences through materials that often revolve around video lectures, or to require that student engagement be channeled into formats that require right or wrong answers.  The team also wished to use the course as an opportunity to learn something about online education.  Instead, they developed a model that included the following features:

• Limited enrollment and small discussion sections: A central aim of the course was to enable students to engage in supervised discussion of difficult issues in small groups.  This required limiting enrollment (to 500 students), distributing students into manageably sized groups (sections of 25), and pairing each section with a Teaching Fellow (TF) to lead discussions over the course of the semester.

• Experimental combinations of materials and technologies: The 500 course participants were divided into four groups, which were provided different combinations of reading materials and discussion software.  The members of two the four groups pursued a "Case-law Curriculum,” while the members of the other two groups pursued a "Global Curriculum."  As their names suggest, the former emphasized judicial opinions, primarily from the United States, while the latter emphasized copyright law in jurisdictions other than the United States.  Two of the four groups employed the standard discussion software contained in the EdX platform, which the other two employed in addition a collaborative, PDF annotation tool, called “NB”, which had been developed by Prof. David Karger at M.I.T..

• Live events: Six times during the spring, Prof. Fisher invited guest experts into his HLS copyright class for live, special events.  These events were attended by both the HLS students and the CopyrightX TFs. The discussions were webcast live; the EdX students viewed and discussed the presentations in real-time with their TFs and fellow section members. Questions for the speakers from the HLS students as well as the EdX students were channeled back into the classroom. Recordings of the events can be accessed here.

Although enrollment was limited, all of the course materials are open access, and can be used by individuals interested in creating their own courses of study, as well as by groups of people interested in studying copyright together. 

Students were assessed on the basis of their participation in discussions and their performance on a final exam. Nearly half of the students took the final exam; roughly three-quarters of the students who took it passed.

The course team is still analyzing the rich body of data generated by the course, but all early indicators suggest that the course was a success.  The use of small-group discussions seems to have enhanced learning and retention.  The teaching fellows as well as the students in all sectors of the course seem to have learned a good deal about the copyright system.  Prof. Fisher and the course team hope to learn from and build on this year’s experiments when offering the course again in Spring 2014.