Center for Educational Excellence & Innovation How to Develop a Course

The table below outlines the general phased process for conducting live events, though activities will vary depending on the particular requirements of each event.

There are several different models for live online conferences, including use of pre-recorded presentations prior to (e.g., flipped classroom), during, or after the live event.

1. Project Initiation

CE & Course directors: Define course goals, scope, and expectations
Review process, milestones, and deliverables.

2. Event Preparation

CE & Presenters: Pre-record & edit content (if applicable)
Conduct technical rehearsals.

3. Event

Course directors: Session presentations, workshops, etc.

4. Post-event

CE: Post session videos, if applicable. Run attendance report.

Enduring materials may be produced as an extension of live virtual or face-to-face conferences, or they may be designed and developed from inception as an online-only course. The process for developing on-demand enduring courses has five main phases.

1. Project Initiation

Project is reviewed and assessed for marketability and copyright liability (see copyright section).

2. Pre-production

Speaker orientation
Image copyright review
Slide Formatting
Citation Formatting
Image research & revisions
Reference review, research and revision

3. Production

Record & edit presentation, if necessary

4. Course Build

Transcribe presentation audio
Proofread transcription 
Create course shell
Upload course content

5. Quality Assurance & Release

Editorial and technical review and approval

Timelines

Project timelines for online courses vary widely with the dependencies described above. Assuming no significant delays due to those dependencies, the time frame for single 30-60 minute didactic presentation is 10 weeks.

What is Copyright?

Copyright is a form of intellectual property law that protects original works of authorship, including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture.

Copyright gives the originator of such work the exclusive legal right to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material, for a fixed number of years. The copyright holder can assign the copyright to another person or organization. Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed. A Work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form.

How Does Copyright Apply to my Presentation?

Most speakers include images in their presentations. Images may include photos of clinical conditions, diagnostic images (e.g., scan, scopes, sonograms), charts, graphs, tables, etc. Images used in presentations published on the CEEI course site require:

• Ownership, license, public domain, or permission to use the image for commercial purposes
• Removal of Protected Health Information
• Consent from anyone who can be identified in a photo (or the parent/guardian of minors).
  NOTE: consent is not required for anyone who has been de-identified, e.g., by blurring or blacking out eyes.

Access does NOT equal permission!

Just because images are freely available online doesn’t mean they are not copyrighted.

Online enduring courses do NOT qualify for Fair Use due to the fact that they are commercial products distributed to an external audience.

Images incorporated in a presentation that is published online for a fee may – or may not – be subject to copyright. There are several considerations for determining whether or not an image is subject to copyright, as illustrated by this decision tree.

Background

Just because materials are freely available online doesn’t mean they are not copyrighted! Use of creative work owned by others in enduring online commercial products puts Boston Children’s Hospital at risk for copyright infringement.

Policy

The following are required for the display of any visual content such as tables, charts, graphs, photos, scans, illustrations, etc. on our site:

• Rights, license, or permission to use the work for commercial purposes, (see usable images below).
• Removal of Protected Health Information from diagnostic images (scans, sonograms, etc.)
• Consent from anyone who can be identified in a photo (or the parent/guardian of minors). NOTE: consent is not required for anyone who has been de-identified, e.g., by blurring or blacking out eyes.
• Source information for the work in question, including URL (if applicable) and author/owner (if known).

 Conditions under which copyrighted images may be used

• You created and own the image
• Boston Children’s owns the image – e.g., you or a Boston Children’s colleague created it in the course of clinical activity
• Explicit permission to use in commercial products has been granted through:
  • A paid license
  • Creative Commons or other license
• The image is in the public domain. This includes:
  • Some works created by the government
  • Works published in the US prior to 1923, and maybe after, depending on publication details

Images that are NOT subject to copyright

• Diagnostic imagery (output from monitors, radiological images, sonograms, scopes etc.)
  • PHI must be removed.
• Representations of plain data that has not been creatively enhanced.
  • Plain bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots and other presentations of data may be OK to include, but we will need source information to make this determination and cite appropriately.

Permissions Process

A structured process is necessary to ensure we adhere to copyright guidelines and reduce project timelines. For any material that you did not create or photograph yourself (“third-party content”), or do not have license or permission to publish online for commercial purposes:

If the images are NOT essential for communicating presentation content (e.g., decorative images, comics), then remove them from the presentation.

If the images are essential to the substance of your presentation, then try to obtain permission for use from the copyright holder or create a substitute for the image.

Note: these are resource-intensive processes.

How to Find Open Access/ Creative Commons materials

Google Search:

• Select Images under the search bar to limit your search to images.
• Then click “Tools,”>”Usage Rights”>”labeled for reuse”.
• Be sure to save the URL of each item.

Creative Commons search: https://search.creativecommons.org/. Be sure to save the URL of each item.

OPENi (Open Access Biomedical Image Search Engine): https://openi.nlm.nih.gov/

History of Medicine http://ihm.nlm.nih.gov/luna/servlet/view/all

CDC Public Health Image Library (PHIL) http://phil.cdc.gov/Phil/home.asp

MedPix (searchable online open access medical image database): https://medpix.nlm.nih.gov/