Re: faculty coursework online

Lyda Peters asks about policies on faculty ownership of IP in the context of distance edudcation courses. This is, indeed, a hot issue in academe.

By far the best place to start in any investigation of this area is the Copyown web site:

   http://www.inform.umd.edu/copyown/

The author is a lawyer doing a PhD in educational administration with a dissertation focused on university copyright ownership policies, and has collected a wealth of information on current practice. Of particular note are his collection of existing institutional policies and position papers (by AAUP, AAU, ARL, etc.).

On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, Lyda Peters <lydap[_at_]aol.com> asks:
>
> Do professors have any rights by law to "intellectual property" once
> they start to teach online? If yes, what rights?

The answer depends on copyright law, which includes the notion of "work made for hire", and in turn on agency law and the professor's employment contract. It typically also depends on specific institutional policies and procedures.

One common pattern for universities is to assert the institution's rights to the professor's work only where there is money involved. A variant is to assert rights to IP only when significant university resources (over and above the instructor's own effort) went into their creation. This implies that intellectual property in course lecture materials that used to be de facto under the control of the instructor becomes, in a distance ed setting, more likely to be claimed by the institution.

Note that the situation is particularly messy if the online teaching is being done for someone other than the home institution. We're more and more seeing opportunities for professors to moonlight giving distance ed courses for commercial entities (Harvard's Miller being of course the best known recent example).

JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  mailto:jqj[_at_]darkwing.uoregon.edu
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