Copyright and Patent Education: Promoting Student Success by Developing Lifelong Skills

By: Dr. Farzaneh Razzaghi, Ms. Janette García, and  Ms. Kelly Leu — University of Texas, Pan American

Abstract

Intellectual property issues are increasingly important in today’s technology oriented society.  These issues have significant relevance to the academic community, but are not usually taught to students on a broad or systematic basis.  As a result, students are often unfamiliar intellectual property topics such as copyright and patents resulting in a knowledge gap.  This paper describes our experiences with developing and implementing an online workshop that teaches copyright and patent basics to students, a project that can be considered a best practice for a number of reasons. Given the success experienced by two institutions which both successfully implemented this program, we believe that it can be adopted by other institutions.