Zooming in on Education: An Empirical Study on Digital Platforms and Copyright in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the Netherlands

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant change in the types of teaching infrastructure used in higher education. This article examines how the use of commercial digital platforms for educational purposes impacted on teaching practices. At the same time, it shines a light on the experiences and (legal) perceptions of educators as an essential category of stakeholders within the EU copyright legal framework. Against the background of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the study reflects on the process of ‘platformisation’ of education and delves into copyright-related aspects of the online teaching and learning environments. The study is based on the presumption that the pandemic-induced transformation of education would require institutional adjustments as well as an enhanced level of copyright awareness among educators. It provides data and evidence based on an empirical study conducted in 2021 surveying over 200 educators in the UK, Italy, and the Netherlands. The results, presented in this article, point at several problematic aspects in relation to ‘platformised’ educational practices and materials, including a low awareness and misled perceptions on copyright legal rules and an increasing role of digital commercial platforms as factual regulators of the higher education sector.