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[Seemi Ahmad. Assoc. Prof.]

V. Nguyen, BCC wrote:

>As an administrator, I find myself struggling with the topic
of ownership.  Take for instance a course that has already been web-developed -- what happens with that course when the person who developed the course leaves the institution?  >



Since faculty leaving an institution does not leave behind their notes for the new instructor, the same rule applies to online content.

In a recent survey of 19 community colleges in NY State, I found that all compensated faculty for developing their first online course and a good number of them also compensated faculty for developing their second or third online courses. Some schools offered extra stipend for DSL connection. It shows recognition on the part of administration that developing a thorough and comprehensive course requires extra effort and needs to be compensated. The State university of New York Learning Network, which offers a platform for online courses, believes that it takes faculty between 150 to 200 hours to put up an online course. It is much more than transferring your lecture notes on to the Web.

[D. Rowley, Rading Facilitator]

I am puzzled. I am paid for teaching in a classroom. The intellectual property is mine. The teaching is oral, so brief notes work for my lesson plan. If I teach online, I need to write out everything I would ordinarily say to the students. This is going to take far more time and effort. I should recieve extra compensation for this - at least for the original setting up of the course. The payment needs to be for the time  needed to set up the course, not for the intellectual property.

[%sig%]

[Administrator in Maine]

Two quick points:

(1) Preparation, design, revision, etc. of ANY course is time-consuming and requires a certain amount of skill that most instructors in higher education, unfortunately, do not possess.  Most earned a doctorate in a highly-focused, overly-specialized subdiscipline, the course of study for which never addressed pedagogy.  Generally speaking, what most instructors learned about course preparation and design they learned from THEIR instructors who were even more woefully unprepared to dealing with present-day technology.  It is an indictment of higher education that for the most part "prepping a new course" involves little more than cutting and pasting the same old shlock from other courses into a new syllabus and divvying up the chapters of a new textbook.  There are some true innovators out there, but fewer than we would all care to admit.  Most instructors are more pragmatic than creative, valuing efficiency over innovation.

Developing an online course should not by necessity be exponentially more difficult than developing a traditional course.  If that is the case, then somebody isn't working hard enough in developing their traditional courses!

(2) Every class offers its unique challenges and affords its own benefits.  Lecture v. lab.  Four-hour v. one-hour.  Videoconferenced v. live v. taped.  Early morning v. late afternoon v. evening.  Skill-based v. knowledge-based v. value-based.  There are far too many variables in teaching any given course to compensate the preparation of some but not others.

Teaching is teaching.  While online courses may be more "time-consuming," (but perhaps shouldn't be!), there is a great deal more freedom in teaching one relative to time, space and distance constraints.  At least you don't have to wear a tie at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning to teach a programming course you've never taught before on foreign computers with unfamiliar software in a dual enrollment  high school setting!

[Bhamati Viswanathan]

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are central to the question of faculty compensation for course materials and course development (generally, "courses"). Further, it is certainly not a given that faculty (by default, as it were) own IPRs in courses. Nor, for that matter, can institutions argue that "if we pay them for it, we own it" (to paraphrase one speaker): one can pay for work without gaining ownership in its copyright. It's an open question, then - and one that gains urgency as a result of the "added value" that online courses may represent.

In passing, I will note that many institutions have (until recently) ceded IPRs in courses. (Of course, it might be argued that they have not, until recently, found great value to inhere in course ownership.) In the profitable - and comparable - area of patents in academic (mostly scientific) work, however, institutions have traditionally required faculty to assign IPRs in patentable work to the institution on an up front basis; and this practice is well-established despite periodic disputes over faculty rights in revenues that flow from particularly lucrative work.

Why do I bring up the case of patents? One possible scenario is that yes, institutions can and will assert rights in courses, pursuant to the patent model, and that faculty will have to consider their compensation as part of the typical quid pro quo - "professor X teaches,  university Y pays X for (all) teaching related activities and materials, and univ. Y retains (all) academic IPRs; but professor X gets compensation (salary), plus ancillary benefits (tenure, rights in publication, access to resources, etc.)"

The primary benefit to this approach is, I would argue, stability: the institution keeps the work in which it has (presumably) invested, and continues to build a "pool" of academic work on which its strength/reputation can rely. The institution can assess, reward, or give incentives to improve the quality of academic work; it can enhance access to the work (expanding online curricula, inviting outside participation, etc.); and so on. These are useful tasks that I think may be better centralized than individualized. And, perhaps importantly, institutional ownership can dissuade faculty from acting as "free agents" and offering their courses to the highest bidder - which may not be the most desirable outlet for the school or its students.

But the problem lies, I think, in the "quo" part of the equation: institutions have historically offered faculty the "tradeoff" of real, stable, and vital benefits to offset the relinquishment of IPRs: the promise of tenure, the security of long-term employment, the opportunity for scholarship, the right to publication, and the vague-but-necessary support of "academic freedom." Well, we all know that these valuable academic tenets (and rewards) are foundering: I need hardly refer to "adjunctification," or the dubious practice of allowing private sponsors to influence scholars' rights to publish (or not to patent), or other trends that seem inexorably to whittle away at faculty rights without (I hope) gaining recognition that the "tradeoff" is in trouble.

Without the "quo" of faculty rights, rewards, and privileges, how can institutions assert rights in a (potentially) newly lucrative area of academic work? And why would they think any faculty (other than, perhaps, a few with tenure, seniority, or "star" status) might be tempted to cede their rights in work that could be disseminated online from virtually any source (with perhaps money instead of position as recompense for their efforts)? In other words, here's the argument that must be presented to institutions: if they don't pay for online work with added compensation of some sort, they should be prepared for faculty to take the position that they do indeed own their work (especially now, as the matter remains an unsettled one in schools and in the courts) - and, as most employees do when they own IPRs, to run, not walk, to the highest bidder for their work product and services.

[John Garner]

Dear Administrator in Maine...

I think that you might want to re-consider your question in light of the fact that once a certain course is done ENTIRELY on line, as opposed to being done in a seminar-like two-way-video format, that the course online is like an e-book or a textbook.

In other words, for those who follow as instructors of the course, that are not the designers of the course, would in fact have little to do except test, conduct chat room sessions, answer student e-mails and perhaps update the online instructional material that is out on the website. That is, of course, if they understand it well enough.

Testing scenerios can be created on line and test banks that generate unique tests with similar difficulty levels to each student.

In other words, authors get royalities every time that a book that they wrote is used. Why shouldn't an instructor get something for the writing of an on-line course of instruction. Looking at it form another standpoint of business, Bill Gates gets a royalty for Microsoft every time that Windows is installed as an operating system on a computer.

Do not traditional land-based classes adopt textbooks and don't the authors of those textbooks get paid for writing those books? Of course, the rub here is that the student is usually paying that tab above and beyond the price of tuition. No such mechanism exists to bill the student for the on-line class development and the pay for the developer, if there is any, must come from the operating funds of the college.

However, there are no facilities costs incurred in an on-line class. The only cost to the institution is the costs of maintaining the computers and the Internet connections.

This is, of course, a bit of playing the devil's advocate, but these are valid points when you consider it as a comparison and contrast.

The big difference is access. Web-based instruction is open to students anywhere in the world, at least in theory, but students must come to a traditional college for classes

When you add everything up, an on-line college is more economical than a conventional college, even if you have to pay those who develop the on-line courses in addition to those who actually teach the courses.  

Comparing the respective economies of traditional land-based classes and the economies of e-classrooms and true "Internet" courses is like comparing apples to oranges. Even though both are education, they are entirely different.

[Phoebe Butler]

It takes alot of time and creativity to create an online course. As a visiting faculty member,  I spent months getting up in the middle of the night to create an online course.  When teaching the course, I spent hours and hours tweaking it and interacting with the students.  At the end of the semester, the course's contents were taken and given to two senior faculty to teach without even asking my permission.  The senior faculty never said thank you.  One of them did ask to meet with me to inquire what lessons I learned from the course.  

It really hurt me that I never received any feedback on the course from the chair and that the course was just taken and given to two senior faculty.  I really felt used.  But the experience of successfully creating and implementing the course was valuable.

[Steve Marsh]

I have substantial on-line material in a very specific area (ADR -- my website is http://adrr.com/)

However, I've found a number of people who clone my material and then use it for on-line classes.  I discovered this when a firewall failed and the material was available via google for a period before they got it back behind the firewall and where they charged students for it.

I'm not terribly happy about the fact that academics feel free to steal from me.

Any suggestions?

[John Garner]

Dr. Marsh,

First, you need to decide if what you have described to us is a violation of "Fair Use" rules. The following site should help.

http://www.copyright.iupui.edu/checklist.htm

Usually, unless money is being made from the use of the material, there is probably not a violation of law.

However, when you find your material on the net, you could contact whomever is using it and ask them if they would link to your excellent website. That way, your site would get a lot of hits and if monsy becomes an issue, e-advertising could help you fill in the financial gaps.

Mediation is an interesting subject and it is also in demand. Your site appears to be excellent.

[jgarner- Ivy Tech State Colleg]

RE: the TEACH ACT...

This is the most recent legislation regarding using copyrighted material on-line.

If you are unsure about using material you should do a GOOGLE search under TEACH ACT and see how the law looks upon what you intend to do before you do it.

Below is a synopsis of the Teach Act. I am not an attorney so what you see below constitutes only my opinion of the Teach Act. You should go read it for yourself. In general, if you are posting copyrighted material on an open web site, you should be aware that this may not be in compliance with "Fair Use" rules. However, the use of such materials in the development of a restricred on-line course is covered by the "Teach Act" and the rules are different.

Make sure that you KNOW what you are doing before you do it.


The TEACH Act allows accredited nonprofit educational institutions to deliver certain copyrighted works digitally for distance education purposes. In some cases, such institutions may convert non-digital works into digital format for delivery.  In general, the digital distribution allowed under the TEACH Act is limited to distributing materials that are, or normally would be, presented as part of a live class room session.

The following is intended as a summary of key points in the act and provide guidelines to institutions that may wish to take advantage of the TEACH Act. These guidelines are only a summary, and any institution should consult the TEACH Act itself or its own legal counsel to be sure it complies with all the requirements of the TEACH Act.

I.   Who Is Eligible To Make Use of the TEACH Act?

a.   Accredited Institutions. An institution must be an accredited nonprofit educational institution.

b.   Institutional Copyright Policy. The institution must have in place a policy that addresses use by the institution of copyrighted materials that:
i.   Accurately describes US copyright laws to faculty, students and relevant staff; and
ii.   Promotes compliance with such laws by faculty, students and relevant staff.

II.   What Are the Limitations on Digital Distribution under the TEACH Act?

a.   Must Be Part of Class. Digital distribution of materials under the TEACH Act meet each of the following requirements:
i.   The digital distribution must be at the direction or under the supervision of an instructor and be presented as an integral part of a class session of a regular course. In effect, the works must be presented as part of a live class session that is digitally distributed to students or as part of an analogous distance learning class session. This would exclude practices such as:
1.   allowing students to view the materials as part of homework or work outside of class;
2.   allowing students to access the materials multiple times or to store the materials to be accessed at a later time; and
3.   digitally distributing materials such as books and recordings, copies of which would normally be purchased by students.
ii.   The digital distribution must be directly related and of material assistance to the teaching content of the course.
iii.   The digital distribution must be solely for the reception of students officially enrolled in the course.
b.   Copyright Notice. The institution must provide notice to students who will receive materials digitally that the materials may be subject to copyright protection. This notice could be provided in class materials or as part of the digital distribution itself.
c.   Technological Implementation.
i.   The institution must apply technological measures that:
1.   limit reception of digital transmissions of the materials only to students of the course;
2.   prevent retention of the materials by students for longer than the class session; and
3.   prevent further distribution of the materials by students to others.
ii.   The institution may retain copies of digital materials made for distribution under the TEACH Act, provided that the copies:
1.   are not used for any purpose except for distribution in compliance with the TEACH Act in different or subsequent classes or courses; and
2.   are retained and used solely by the institution that made them.

[HV]

You have intellectual property rights to these courses.  I'd try to deal with this administratively-- If that doesn't work, consider getting a lawyer.

[Pamela Peterson /FSU]

Just as students tend to cut & paste material from the web without attribution, faculty do the same thing.  This is quite unfortunate because it discourages the sharing of ideas and material.  

I have had faculty copy my material, remove all references to my name (even to the point of removing my name from footers in PowerPoint slides), and put the material on their web site, claiming it as their own.  While I appreciate that someone likes my material enough to use it, I didn't appreciate their taking full credit for the development of the material.

What to do?  I rely on faculty to do the right thing... and protect my material  In an egregious case, I contacted the faculty member using my material and suggested that they remove my material from their web site that they claimed as their own. I also suggested that if they wish their students to use my material, that's fine -- just link to my web site instead of copying it.  The faculty member complied, but I check out his web site once in a while just to make sure ...

Sharing is wonderful. Copying and taking false credit is not.  

This points to one of the challenges in online material: No matter whether the course is an online course or the material is simply to supplement a traditional classroom experience, faculty have to (1) be courteous and respectful of others (and abide by copyright laws), (2) install some type of security on material they develop to protect against inappropriate use by the very few, and (3) monitor the use of their site and material.  In the case of an online course, in which the preparation of online material is more intense, such diligence is more important.  Universities need to help faculty in these tasks to insure academic integrity.

[%sig%]

[R. Thomas Berner, Penn State]

I have been compensated for devising online courses, but I have to wonder if that would occur again if I merely took a f2f course in which I used a lot of online material and transformed it into an online course (which I've done once). IOW, as faculty use online technology more and more in their f2f courses, can the administration argue that there really isn't any extra work involved and, therefore, no additional compensation?

[%sig%]

[Lewis W. Mustard, PhD]

I agree. I facilitate courses at five different universities and have designed courses for four. Never have I encountered an instance of not with being paid for the design of a new course, unless it was a slight variation of an existing one.

Lewis W. Mustard, Ph.D.
Northcentral University, Associate Professor
Ellis College (NYIT), Adjunct
DeVry University Online, Adjunct
American InterContinental University, Course Designer
Charter Oak State College, Adjunct
Ohio University, Adjunct
Regis University, Adjunct

[Bhamati Viswanathan]

To any faculty member who has created (and been remunerated for) an online course:

Just because you're compensated for it doesn't mean you own it. Are you fine with ceding ownership of copyright in the course to your institution?

I believe there may be advantages to university ownership, but can imagine that some faculty feel that their online work should be specifically compensated. I am very interested, in any case, in hearing how people feel about ownership. Any takers out there?

[anonymous doctoral student--]

Dr. Mustard,

I am an adjunct at a local university and because of my online training and expertise, have been hired to do a WebCt class since the veterans are not into this--upcoming 2005.

NO compensation has been talked about with my chair or his instructional design manager.  When i asked, i was told it depends on the ID team say--and i am scared to ask anymore and i am not kidding.

I normally earn a bit less than $2,000 a class as an adjunct.  My colleague friends across other universities in my area told me they have earned up to $8,000 per class preparing for local community college systems.

I am not even certain WHEN i set up the class  (which i will--gulp) and it does not go IF i will get anything--$-- in the form of compensation.

I am also secretly wondering when i set up the class, whether the veteran group will then use my class preparation and i won't get to teach it anymore or rather, i will be hired to set up all of the classes--the institution's long-range goal.

I am doing this "service" for the experience and hopefully, to get on the list for a ft spot- or at least, a decent reference-and being a part-time non-trad age doctoral student pulling down a full-time salary in the low 70's, the $ is not an issue, but rather experience.

Anonymous grad student---ABD---