Copyright law and distance nursing education.

The authors present essential information regarding the copyright law and online education. This information provides the reader specific aids to assist in designing and implementing distance education courses within the bounds of the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization Act and fair use guidelines. From their research, the authors, who are distance education experts, offer a wide array of educational and legal data to inform nurse educators.

Dentocase - open-source education management system in dentistry.

Since 2001, an interdisciplinary project on multimedia education in medicine has been sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research at the Charité. One part of the project is on dentistry. In the light of the results of a survey of dental students, an Internet-based education management system was created using open-source back-end systems. It supports four didactic levels for editing documentation of patient treatments. Each level corresponds to the learning abilities of the students. The patient documentation is organized to simulate the working methods of a physician or dentist. The system was tested for the first time by students in the summer semester of 2003 and has been used since the winter semester of 2003 as part of the curriculum.

Virtual university governance.

There is a need to establish collaboration alliances or partnerships if we are to provide global Health Informatics educatics education. Agreements need to make provision for the existing diversity between country educational systems as well as variations in funding, legislation and political systems and a number of other issues including intellectual property and copyright. Four virtual University governance models were identified, 1) evolution of existing universities, 2) newly created organisations collectively delivering one type of program eg MBA, 3) a consortium of partners using a common portal and 4) a commercial enterprise. Collectively IMIA academic members need to be in a good position to respond to the global changes in higher education and minimise the risk of failure when establishing a virtual University to collectively deliver Health Informatics education. Others have undertaken a similar path in the past, some successful others not so, we need to learn from these experiences.

Educational implications for copyright in a digital world.

Statutory law and court cases currently leave fair use of copyrighted material poorly defined and fail to provide effective guidance for the use of others' work. Copyright legislation is undergoing significant change, accelerated by the evolution of computing and communication technologies. This paper reviews copyright issues, fair use guidelines, and applicable laws and statutes to help administrators and educators understand and comply with copyright regulations. The paper describes principles of copyright and ownership, the rights of copyright holders, and the conditions under which copyrighted material can be used by others. Recently introduced legislation, such as the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, may significantly affect how educators can use copyrighted material in the future. The integration of computer and communication technology into education raises a number of intellectual property issues for dental schools. This paper provides some general guidelines regarding copyright issues in academic environments.