On 3/2/00, Harold Federow <haroldf[_at_]bsquare.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Mar 01, 2000, Art MacCord <amaccord[_at_]rcblaw.com> wrote:
> >
> > However in the coming days, the very best professor/lecturer of any
> > given subject, such as 18th Century European History (let's call him
> > the superstar), can be made available to 100,000 students via distance
> > learning instead of the mere 500 or so students who fit into the
> > amphitheaters that pass as college classrooms. Note that the lecturers
> > who would have had jobs lecturing to the other 99,500 freshmen not
> > reached by the superstar traditionally will need to find something
> > else to do. The value of the notes and performance of the superstar
> > is going to be augmented. That augmented value will be the incentive
> > for more disputes.
>
> I wouldn't be too sure about this last. When I was in college, one of
> the superstars of economics was Paul Samuelson, who wrote the standard
> Econ 101 text. A friend of mine who actually had him as a professor
> in Econ 101 said he was one of the worst teachers he had.
>
> I also think that the opportunity to interact personally with the
> professor teaching the course is at least as important and you can't
> do that via distance learning.
There are going to be as many variants to this story as there are teachers. I've had teachers that were so excruciating boring that I would squirm in my seat waiting for their lectures to end -- but when I got to read my notes I'd discover that the lectures were brilliant. Style and content are not always in harmony with each other.
Properly designed, distance education products could take what is best from a teacher and interpret it for maximum benefit. Perhaps such a teacher should not lecture "live" but should design a curriculum and design a course.
One reason for investing the intellectual property of such courses with the teachers is the likelihood that the content will be revised and will not become stale. But what happens when a teacher who designs a course in one university moves to another? If the university owns part of the intellectual property in that course, the value of its investment will fade unless it has an agreement with the intellectual author (the teacher) to keep the course current. And that brings us into the Arthur Miller type of case. If a university is marketing a course created by a "star" teacher and that teacher moves to another institution, 1) what rights will the university have to continue to market the course if a component of its intellectual property is owned by the teacher, 2) what right does the new school have to limit the teacher's work on his own product written for another school, 3) will the teacher have the right to create a similar, updated version for his new employer?
Perhaps the university model is not the proper one to use to for these arrangements; the university, it seems, is really a "publisher" of courseware in these cases. There is no restriction (as far as I know) preventing a teacher who works for one institution from publishing his work with a university press from another school. These are issues the consequences of which will probably have to be hammered out through negotiation. I'm not certain whether any general principle applies.
Slight change of topic:
This last Saturday (Feb 26) NINCH and the College Art Association held its fourth annual Copyright Town Meeting, this time on the topic of faculty intellectual property. Speakers included Christine Sundt, Jane Ginsburg, Sanford Thatcher and Rodney Petersen. In a few weeks David Green, the Executive Director of NINCH, will post a summary of this meeting on the NINCH site (http://www.ninch.org/). Taped transcripts are available; write to audioarc[_at_]flash.net (#200223-735AB and #200223-737). Christine Sundt's talk "Been There -- Done That," has been posted at <http://libweb.uoregon.edu/aaa/vrc/CAAcls.htm>. My introductory message, touching on the social, political, economic and intellectual consequences of the rise of distance education, appears at <http://www.pipeline.com/~rabaron/CAANYC2000Baron.htm>.
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