More Universities to Publish Courseware Online

prostoalex writes "After MIT's decision to put the course materials online free of charge, seven other universities expressed similar goals. With the grant from Hewlett-Packard the universities of Washington, Rochester, Toronto, Cornell, Columbia, Ohio State as well as MIT will provide their courses online at a single location. DSpace was launched with a $1.8 million grant from HP. MIT expects to spend about $250,000 annually to maintain and operate the archive. The page is available here." We also have an update on MITs courseware offerings, so read more if you care about such things. In related news, dchud writes "DSpace, which has been in production use at MIT Libraries since September, is now available under a BSD-style license as version 1.0 at sourceforge. DSpace is a repository for capturing, persisting, and providing access to the digital research output of the MIT community, and will be the long-term archive for OpenCourseWare materials. Now it's available as an institutional repository platform for the rest of the world. See also coverage from the Boston Globe, CNET, and the AP (via NYT, reg req'd)."

Comments

Biggest problem with these sites...

[edremy]

Copyright.

I went to a talk at EDUCAUSE last month by the head of the MIT project. Copyright is one of their toughest problems: how do you make publically available the reams of material that professors want to use in their courses? [1]

Her example was an architecture course that isn't listed on OpenCourseware. IIRC, it has something like 800 images on the private MIT website for the class. Every single one of those images has to be cleared before putting the site up for the public: she said they've done about 680 so far. Many of the images can't be published: the owner simply won't allow it, so you have to find some other source or simply drop it from the site.

"The system doesn't scale" was the basic conclusion. They have a small group of people doing nothing else. I can't imagine they are paying them enough.

[1] Most of this material is, to be blunt, pirated. (I'm speaking as an instructional tech guy here: I have to deal with these issues.) Faculty will happy scan entire books worth of art, digitize huge tracts of books and in one notable case last year, actually *making multiple photocopies of an entire textbook.* We deal with it by sticking our heads in the sand and blocking anyone outside of our school from seeing it, as do most schools, but I pity MIT: they actually have to sort through the mess.

Re:Biggest problem with these sites...

[czarneki]

This is the same problem that coursepacks already went through. When photocopying first became widely available, professors contracted with copyshops to make coursepacks, collections of excerpts from copyrighted books, so that students in their classes would not have to purchase an entire library of books. Neither the professors nor the copyshops thought about paying the publisher royalties for this. When the publishers finally took them to court, one of the arguments made by the copyshops/professors was that it would simply be too complicated/costly to get copyright clearance for every little piece in a typical coursepack. The courts squashed that argument in no time.

But the professors and students wanted coursepacks and they were willing to pay, and lo and behold, the publishers got their act together and formed associations to make copyright clearance for coursepacks extremely easy and efficient. It's basically all automated now.

There's no reason that this same system can't be adopted for web publication of coursepacks. Copyright clearance need not be time-consuming or painful. The trouble, of course, is that whereas the students were willing to pay for their coursepacks (even with the added premium of the royalties), no one is going to pay for stuff on the web. Unless we make the current students pay higher tuition to subsidize web publication of their coursepacks or get the government to subsidize the effort, the publishers won't want to adopt the licensing scheme to this new use.

compare this to the extortion going on UofO

[jackstack]

Greedy, Morally-Corrupt, Thoughtless, Wasteful Bastards in the Biology/Life Sciences dept at University of Oregon in Eugene are charging $33 photocopies of crappy hand drawn molecules and chicken scratch notes.

Has anyone else noticed this tragedy going on at their local colleges and universities? It's f**in' putting a pricetag on knowledge!

Here's my letter to the Prof. Karen Sprague:

To whom it may concern,

I apologize in advance if you are not accountable for the issue which I raise in this e-mail. I don't know who else to send it to... so here goes.

I am a student in your Bio class. I am writing this e-mail to express my extreme frustration in regards to the lecture notes which are *required* class materials. I was STRUCK tonight when opening the plastic packaging to find nothing more than 113 pages of handwritten drawings and notes.

My first thought was ... "I paid $32.90 for this?!?!" Then I calculated, at 5 cents a page (which is more than reasonable), 113 copied pages (b/w) should cost no more than $5.65. The disparity in cost between what I (a minimum wage earning undergraduate student) am REQUIRED to PAY vs. what is REASONABLE is nothing less than astounding and arguably morally reprehensible.

I urge, no - *BEG* you to consider more affordable solutions to reproducing these lecture notes. (university copying service, scan to pdf version and make available for download) Why, on earth, should students have to pay so much money for something that they have received for *FREE* in other situations? After all ... what else are we paying for in our tuition and fees?

Again - I warmly apologize if you are not responsible for the unfair pricing of the lecture notes. (pricing of *lecture notes* ... this is sad...) If this is the case, please forward my message to those responsible.

The reality is that I have no choice in this situation. I must pay... But I refuse to pay without shedding some light on what I see to be a real injustice to students. If nothing is ultimately done ... it would not be hard to report this to other parties which may draw due attention to the issue. At the very least, as a temporary measure... give some justification to the students who are probably and quite rightly asking themselves, "why did I pay so much for this?".

Anonymous