Addressing common FLEX misconceptions:
- Our budget is limited.
FLEX is complementary for individually licensed institutions. As long as your institution has a Statutory Education Licence agreement in place with Copyright Agency, FLEX is automatically available to you.
- We already have a LMS/We don’t need a new platform to manage our teaching content.
Firstly, it’s important to note that FLEX isn’t a Learning Management System. Rather FLEX is a unique content management platform that has been designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing Learning Management System.
Reasons to add FLEX to your existing suite of tools include:
– building a central online repository to deliver content links to your students in a seamless and consistent way.
– accessing high-quality publisher digital originals and content uploaded by other institutions.
– easily managing copyright compliance when using third party text and images for educational purposes under the Statutory Education Licence, and as Australian Higher Education and VET providers that are registered with accreditation bodies such as TEQSA, ASQA, VRQA & WA TAC are required to comply with Australian legislation including the Copyright Act 1968 as a condition of their ongoing registration.
– delivering a high quality experience to your students as online teaching becomes more and more prominent.
- I’m not comfortable with technology/We don’t have IT staff.
You don’t need any technical knowledge to use FLEX. Upon registering it takes our team a maximum of 24h to set up your account, after which you can start using it immediately. FLEX is cloud-based, so you don’t need to install anything – simply log in online with your username and password and you’re good to go!
- I’m wary of changing the way we do things/I don’t have time to train my staff.
We incorporated user feedback when developing FLEX, with a view to make the platform as simple and straightforward as possible. You can create links to excerpts in 4 easy steps that are clearly signposted, with support articles, support chat and tooltips at your fingertips.
In addition, our series of webinars and newsletter dedicated to FLEX users are full of tips and guidance to help with the initial learning curve.
As for students, they can easily access the content links via a browser window. No special reader is required – all they need is an internet connection.
- We don’t have much time to dedicate to a new system right now.
We recommend that you start creating links for a few selected units and then regularly enter new content in FLEX throughout the year.
FLEX is a big time-saver in the long run. With all your content in one place, it is easy to manage your newly centralised resources. Once a link is created, it is automatically rolled over from one year to another. You only have to manage changes to existing readings/additions or archive old links when required. FLEX links don’t break, so you can rest assured that once created you won’t need to update them unless the readings themselves need to be changed for academic reasons.
- What if I don’t find content I’m interested in in FLEX?
The key purpose of FLEX is to help you store your own content in a central digital repository and manage copyright compliance easily. FLEX grows regularly and rapidly, with four sources of content currently available :
– Your own scans
– Other institutions’ scans. As more content is uploaded to FLEX and as the library grows, there will be more likelihood that a particular extract or an article that you are looking for has already been uploaded by another user for you to access.
– Publisher e-textbooks. On a quarterly basis we enrich the list of publisher e-textbooks available to our users. You can use our publisher request form to ask for specific titles you would like to see in FLEX.
– British Library titles. If you’ve opted in for setting up a British Library account, you have then the possibility to order scans from their over 80 million item collection.
- I am concerned about how our data will be used.
Copyright Agency will access the usage data generated by FLEX to guide the copyright payments we make to our members. This ensures that the licence fees collected annually from your institution are distributed as accurately as possible to the copyright owners of the works that you use for educational purposes every day. The use of FLEX does not have any privacy implications as it does not access any PII (Personally Identifiable Information) of the students accessing links.
Any other point you would like to address? Join our next webinar, or contact us at flex-support@copyright.com.au