Utrecht University is now in the SURF-federation!

Finally it has been arranged: The Utrecht University authentication is now connected to the SURF-federation. The reason why I am so happy is that we can now advertise SURFmedia in our institution. No need to create an own account for teachers and now finally teachers can easily limit access to their video's: students can access them using their university ID. If you enter the url to the embedded video students are neatly requested to enter their ID. Sadly, if you enter the url of the page describing the video students do not get a clear request.
We are working on a teachers manual and then we can get on with advertising. The main limitation is of course the fact we cannot upload copyrighted materials. A large part of the videos used in classroom settings are copyrighted materials (which can legally be shown in a classroom, but cannot be copied to a streaming server....)

Who owns teaching materials?

Only a week ago I ran into an interesting question which arose for the first time. A member of the teaching staff had left university and removed course materials from his/her Blackboard course. Staff preparing the course site could not find the materials which were in place last year.
We have not got our Learning Objects repository in place yet, otherwise this would have been the perfect place to recover these documents. It does clearly show that a discussion on the intellectual property rights of teaching materials created by teachers is worth while. Actually: the discussion itself is not all the interesting, if a teacher has created materials while being employed by the university, the copyrights belong to the university. I practice however not everybody feels the same way about this and that is why it would be a good idea to raise this discussion.