Developing a class

I recently was involved in a "discussion" over copyright laws at work. My employer directed employees to scan a hard copy book that a few employees recieved from a class that they had paid for and taken and turned those hard copy pages into word/power piont soft copy documents. We were then instructed to "model" or use the soft copy as a "template" for a class we are creating. I did a little research and with what I found I was not comfortable doing this which resulted in a fairly ugly set of emails and a nice discussion with a few of my supervisors. At the end of the discussion I was told that I missunderstood and that they didn't want me to copy the class but to simply take the slide read the bullet and then re-type it in my own words as well as maybe deleting some that we wouldn't need which would in turn would make this our class and not the same class that was in the hard copy form. I agreed to help them work on it, more due to not wanting to loose my job in this market but I'm still looking for some clarification. They said they talked to our legal department and everything was fine but I never heard any of that or saw any emails. Am I doing something wrong here, becasue it sure feels like it to me? Thanks

That is a copyright violation.

They need the author's permission and/or they need to pay him.

Thanks for the reply, now I have a follow up question. If we decided to create a class on our own not based off of the other material but it is based on learning a paticular piece of software, would that still put us in the same general category because the software itself is protected or can anyone create a class based on a piece of software as long as it's not based on someone else's course work? This software is a commercial software and the copies purchased for a class were purchased legally through the company but I'm not sure if you can develop a class based on a piece of software that is copyright or patent protected itself without permission/authorization from the company, which I don't if that has been done or not.