RE: Distance Learning and Copyright

With respect, as an employee who works for the distance education division at a Canadian university, I think some may be missing the point.

Distance education is not meant to replace the traditional university (unlike mail-in universities) but rather to make university education accessible to those who are unable to "attend" university in its traditional setting. But for distance education some students would not earn a degree.

Many institutions offering distance education agree that the traditional classroom setting is the best option but it shouldn't be the only option. Making university available to those who live in remote areas or who cannot attend regular classes due to their job or family situations is a laudable goal especially since student demographics are changing and continue to change.

But this is not the forum to discuss the pros and cons of distance education. As for the copyright issue...

Our division requests that "content specialists" (usually academics) sign a contract assigning copyright in the material to the university. This is done for purely practical reasons; developing a course so that it can be effectively delivered in a distance education format is very expensive and time consuming. Content specialists and instructors vary from year to year and if a course had to be developed from scratch with each new academic the program would simply not be viable.

The agreement stipulates that professors are more than welcome to use the material they develop in their on campus course and if they choose to incorporate the material into a textbook we assign the copyright back to them and adopt the textbook for the distance education offering.

Lillian Received on Thu Jan 02 2003 - 16:30:50 GMT