Sunday, March 4, 2012

Does Netflix Have a Future in Education?


These are two blog I found that is discussing Netflix and educational uses.

3 comments:

  1. Is it really up to Netflix to enforce who abuses its resources, though? This makes me sad, because our library is careful to pay the public display price for videos that will be shown in class. I think it's wrong for large institutions to skirt the rules like this.

    This reminds me a little of a program that University of Maryland offered while I was there. In an effort to keep students from pirating music, they gave us each accounts that let us download as much music (legally) as we wanted. Maybe the university could do something like subsidizing personal netflix accounts for its students?

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  2. I think Melinda makes some great points - my school never gave us an explicit policy about using Netflix but I do know a few teachers have used it. I've only used Netflix once with my students and with how slow our school's server is the audio wasn't matching up with the video. The only video I've shown this year is the teacher's edition of Donald in Mathmagic Land.

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  3. The discussions linked to this post make it pretty clear that this is not about copyright as much as about the terms of use. If the videos are being shown to meet the objectives of a class, this falls under fair use and is legal within copyright law. However, as one article stated, the fair use provisions of copyright law do not override the terms of use, and I'm afraid that this use seems to violate the terms of use. Additionally, the library letting anyone watch just about anything using their NetFlix account seems to go beyond the bounds of fair use.

    Note that there are times that fair use does negate a publisher's attempts to limit use, but it does not seem to do that in this case.

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