Copyright Concerns for Educators: Online Learning Post Pandemic Effect

Online distance education was once a process that was not easily been accepted by students, even by the educators, but when the pandemic strikes, they had to adopt and adapt the process in order to gain knowledge. The COVID-19 has resulted in shutting down schools, including tertiary institutions, all across the world. Consequently, education changed dramatically, and the mode of teaching was done remotely and on a digital platform. One of the adoptions of online learning involves using numerous online platforms and inserting interactive programs, music, animated graphics, photos in the teaching material to attract the interest of students. These types of works are, more often than not, copyrighted works that belong to someone. Generally, a license or permission must be sought before these works can be used by anyone. The permission or license, once granted, would involve a licensing fee or royalty payments to the copyright owner. However, this article looks at the law relating to the copyright exploitation awareness in the context of the law of intellectual property and the exceptions to this law, in particular, the scope of the hybrid fair dealing defence for education. This paper employs a doctrinal analysis using secondary data from academic journals, books, and online databases. The findings will respond to the legal framework for the understanding of copyright exploitation and its exception in the post-pandemic era