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Professor Sells Lectures Online
KnightMB writes "Students at NCSU have the option of purchasing the lectures of a professor online. The Professor did this as a way to help those that missed class, didn't take good notes, or from another country and have trouble understanding an English speaking Professor. The reactions on campus were mixed among the students as some saw it as a great way to keep up with things should real life interfere and others see it as something to pay for on top of the tuition cost at the university.
Each one cost $2.50 for the entire lecture. Some students feel it should be free or cost less. The professor brings up a point that doing this takes extra effort and it's only fair that they should have to pay for that extra time and effort needed to put the lectures online for sale such as editing, recording equipment, etc. No one is forced to purchase the lectures, they are only an additional option that students will have.
Quote Dr. Schrag "Your tuition buys you access to the lectures in the classroom. If you want to hear one again, you can buy it. I guess you could see the service as a safety net designed to help the students get the content when life gets in the way of their getting to class."
Schrag explained that $1.50 of the money goes directly to ind-music.com, the host of the Web site offering the service. One dollar then goes to Schrag to offset the cost of recording and editing the lengthy lectures.
If he's only getting that percentage anyway, he could have saved his students money by making it a podcast.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
To whomever thinks the pricing is outrageous... it should dawn on you that the alternative is NO SERVICE for NOTHING. Those are the two alternatives and the only two. Now which would you prefer: The option of purchasing non-required lecture notes or no option at all. That's what I thought.
Seems like a good deal. If you don't want to pay extra, just go take the notes yourself... you paid for it already anyway. If you want the stuff for free, just get someone else to record it for you.
But yes, if he is offering very clear, and clean mp3 versions of his lecture, this could be a non trivial task to make sure the audio is audible, which is what your money would be paying for. This is on top of the lecture. He is isn't required to do this.
Most other professors have written notes instead... which probably would be more useful than this.
He starts racing through lectures and writes equations on the board faster than students can copy them, because "if they keep catch up, that can always buy the video."
I can see students getting together to buy them all for study purposes and then bundling them all together to either sell to people taking the class next semester or more than likely just sharing them all. Before long the professor is easily found on file sharing networks.
Information does want to be free after all.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
The Professor did this as a way to help those that missed class, didn't take good notes, or from another country and have trouble understanding an English speaking Professor.
Great idea! A better idea would be if the non-English-speaking professors would do the same thing, so that English-speaking students have a way of understanding their lectures.
Seriously: I had to drop a class once because I couldn't understand a word the Vietnamese professor spoke.
What a wonderful way to reward laziness. And hey, while you're at it, pad your pockets through your podcast? Ridiculous.
I see someone's apparently never been to college.
What happens when a family member takes ill or dies? What happens if you get sick? Or break your leg? Or (as I did a couple months ago) suffer a spontaneous lung collapse?
If you're working, you call in sick, go on leave if necessary, go back to work when you can and no harm done.
In college, you miss a class and in some cases, you fail the course. It doesn't matter why you missed it; if you don't know the material, you have no hope of passing. You have now wasted potentially thousands of dollars, several months worth of your time and have a permanent black mark on your record, which will affect your later job prospects. All because you might have been walking down the street one day and slipped on the sidewalk.
I went to college; obviously, I know there are days when kids just don't feel like going to class. But you know what? There are days when 40-year-olds don't feel like going to work either. The difference is, most white-collar workers can call in sick, take a personal day or vacation day. (In fact, personal days and vacation days are *intended* to reward "laziness" as you put it - people need downtime.) College students officially get no unscheduled days off, for any reason. (Some professors are more relaxed than others, but my university had no such thing as "sick days". And anyway, if you miss important material, there's no hope of passing final exams.)
And just in case you're still sitting in judgment of college students' "laziness", consider the fact that many college students have classes six days a week, year round, from 8AM to 10PM, and on the off day they're doing homework. This was the way my student life was at NYU. My last 2 years, I got about 3 hours of sleep every single night, and some nights I got none. You're going to judge somebody even if they do just feel like taking a day off now and then?
These kids are ungrateful jerks for complaining over $2.50, though. I would have given my left nut for the chance to pay $2.50 for a missed lecture when I was in college. No such technology even existed back then to do so (unless the prof. wanted to spend all his off hours making analog cassette copies for his students).
Well let us do some math here. At $1 per lecture in his pocket, and let us say 25 people grab a copy of the lecture, that is $25 for what probably takes 2-3 hours to prepare. This assuming he doesn't have to cover some equipment costs, in which case he might even be losing money. Personally I think $2.50 for a lecture is cheap, and I paid for my own schooling. Why should his time be free? If you don't like having to pay $2.5 for the audio lecture, then bloody well show up for class or develop a network to cover for you when you can't.
Hear hear hear....
Students paying tuition are paying for fair access to course materials. Providing these materials selectively and at extra cost to privileged students is unfair and exploitative. It skews the bell curve towards wealthier students and thus obviates the level playing ground provided by a lecture-centric educational system.
If this good professor wishes to charge for his knowledge, he should abandon tenure and leave the university. Once the university is no longer pushing students into his course he can charge what he will for his pontifications. Any bets on whether that will reach $2.50 per download?
Only those who live in their ivory tower / have delusions of grandeur, like the GP seems to have.
Somewhere along the lines, he seems to have forgot that his salary is his compensation for dispensing his knowledge.
"Direct correlation" means that those with lower attendance *tend to* have lower grades. There are a lot of variables here, including teacher's ability, course content, and student's learning abilities. I've noticed that in my classes there is a direct correlation between whether or not you are caucasian and whether you make it to university, but you don't see us banning non-whites.
Aside from statistical variability, your job is to teach. It is theirs to learn. This involves learning how to learn: if they must discover through failing courses (or perhaps simply getting "bad grades", which I, for one, am comfortable with) that certain learning tactics don't work well, they'd might as learn it, instead of simply being told that they have no alternative to your preferred learning tactic.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
And we probably shouldn't allow tutors or all those help guides that cost $30 apiece either. Because equality is the golden rule.
Thank god didn't apply to me-- I bought my way thorugh college while working 55 hours a week. The lucky poor guys on grants had 55 hours a week to study that I didn't.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You clearly have never taught anything.
.preparing lectures and course materials takes a fair amount of time and effort.
I have taught.
. .
However, I always had the impression that that's what I got paid for. My students are clients.
KFG
If he is only interested in making a quick buck then preventing him from charging will just mean that he won't do it at all.
The only reasonable alternative is to have the university pay him the $2.50 per lecture. The only downside there is price control. He'd only have one buyer (the university) so it'd be difficult to adjust the price to find out how much the lectures are really worth to students.
Cow Cube
Because they got what they paid for already.
RTFA. It's not hosted on university servers; and how do you know he's recording it with university equipment? In any case lots of universities have the policy that academics retain IP rights on their work; others don't. I guess NCSU does.
What, you think he should be compelled to do give his work away for free? Even if he should be (which would be monstrous), it's a purely nominal profit anyway -- to cover the effort and materials, as TFA says.
RTFA before letting a knee-jerk reaction effect a regime change on your brain.
FWIW I think it's ethically a grey area when academics choose to withhold their work by not putting it in an open-access archive, or by publishing only in for-profit journals -- just as much as most people around here have mixed feelings (at best) about proprietary computer code. But this isn't the same ballpark: the grey area is still miles away. And legally there's certainly no question of there being anything fishy here, unless the university has completely corrupt policies.
In the course that I teach, and have taught, I make my lecture notes and powerpoints available for downloading by all my students. I tell them that I don't want them to necessarily be taking copious notes, but rather to be experiencing the learning that is embodied by the in-class experience. Later, they can download the notes and reflect on the combination of the text and the experience.
I have had one or two students in the past that, despite my warnings in the very first class, chose to avoid the seminars and just download the notes. Invariably, they fail the course miserably, since they literally miss half the material - the experiential half - despite the fact that the text that is performed is the text that is downloaded.
A good prof will create a sufficiently engaging and useful experience in the classroom so that the students will do whatever they can to not miss the class.
(As an aside, relative to the "it's my intellectual property" thread, I make all of my materials on applied media theory freely available on request to any professor anywhere in the world who wants to use them under an appropriate CC license. Yes, it's material that I have evolved and developed over years. Yes, it represents a considerable amount of work and scholarship. And yes, it enables me to influence and touch so many more students than I could ever hope to reach directly. In return, I achieve recognition and reputation that are among the important currencies of the academy. Doing so also results in invitations for paying gigs in various cool places around the world.)
The students have already paid tuition to hear the content of the lecture, why should they pay again.
So, as an analogy, if you pay to see a play, you should get to see it as many times as you want since you have already paid your admission? Or maybe you think you should be provided with a recording of the performance as well?
The interpretation here is that paying tuition gives you the right to attend the lecture. Not the right to view it however you want - but to attend it at a specific time and a certain location - just like a ticket to a 7:15 movie - you don't get to use it to go to the 7:30 movie in another theatre.
Plus, he's recording all of this and hosting all of this with university equipment.
No, he isn't. He's hosting it on an indie music site. Also, even if it is university equipment he may have to pay for use, or he may have purchased his own equipment. He mentions a cost for the equipment, but not how that cost is incurred.
As for taking time and effort, I'm pretty sure a microphone and tape recorder is all it takes to record a lecture (that's how I did it in school in the "old" days). Then you plug the headphone jack into the line-in and record it to an mp3 or whatever format you want and you're done. Not much more work than ripping a CD.
If you read the article, and I can tell you didn't, you would also have found out that he does perform editing of the lecture. The extent of the editing is unknown. It could be as simple as taking out any extended pauses or it could include re-recording audio that isn't clear, or taking out ambient noise. Without purchasing one, (and attending the actual lecture), it isnt possible to know what editing is done.
I don't think he is doing anything wrong with this. Sure, he could do this out of the goodness of his own heart, but there would be students who would then blow off the lecture since they could listen to it later. Statistically, this will result in a lower grade for them, so an educator should try to minimize the number of students who skip class. A small fee seems to provide a good balance between convenience and assisting the students.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
... and then he'd really be working for literally nothing. Look, maybe on Planet Hackwrench paying tuition fees gives you ownership of every idea a professor ever has and every minute of his time, 24/7, but in real life, a professor's employment by a university has some differences from slave labour.
How about a student recording the lecture and selling the result for $2.50 a pop? It takes no extra time or effort away from the professor and the student already paid for the content. Why not profit from their attendance by providing a service to those who cannot attend or chose not to?
....
I'd be willing to bet either the University or the Professor would try engaging copyright rules however. But then the students have paid for the content so they're not voiceless in the matter. What if the recording was sold to non-students or students of other universities? What is the copyright ramifications to the student, professor or university that accepts public funding?
Or in the case of the good professor who created extra income selling such material... Did he create it with university equipment? Did he use student labor in whole or in part? Were they paid/reimbursed? Did the professor state this extra income and meet the tax requirements? Was the professor authorized by the university to resell material he was already reimbursed for and does the professor hold reproduction rights over this material?
And so on and so forth
... didn't come out of YOUR pocket. Seriously, I went to a school populated by far too many rich kids where the cost per year was about $40,000, many kids had a monthly wire from home for $1,000 for "walking around money", and one student got $9k of Neiman-Marcus furniture for an apartment she lived in for a whole year. And when a particular department charged $5/semester for copy fees for the daily worksheets there were howls of protest. That, after all, competes with beer money, in a way tuition charged to scholarships/trust fund/student loans do not.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
No, it really is is IP. His specific wording certainly is his IP, and his examples may be as well. It is a performance. If you simply take his lecture and paraphrase it, you are probably producing a derivative work of his performance. This is not allowed. You are, however, free to take the facts you learned and put together your own lecture from scratch, and I don't think he was trying to claim otherwise.
I'd be pretty upset if someone was taking my work, even work I've been paid for, and presenting it as his own. The GP mentioned his course notes/outline being used by another lecturer without permission and without attribution. That's a BIG no-no. It's not mean-spirited to demand credit or compensation for your work (and no, being paid to give the original lecture is not compensation for someone who turns around and gives a verbatim or paraphrased copy of the lectures later).
When John Rawls discovered that many of his students were trying to take down his lectures word for word, he started offering copies of his lecture notes for forty cents. This was in 1977. The 1991 edition of his lectures is now available as a book.
Tuition is not like a movie ticket that admits you to selected lectures. Should professors be allowed to charge students directly for holding office hours? Answering questions after class?
What the Schrag's supporters seem to be missing is that most professors' academic positions are not directly connected to tuition. They're hired to be creative people and to support the mission of the university. Teaching is a large component of that mission, and professors who teach are paid, partly by tuition, partly by state grants or private endowment, partly by alumni donations, to teach, not to deliver lectures. Likewise, students are not paying to sit in class, they're paying for the opportunity to learn and to interact with recognized experts. If Schrag feels that providing handouts, transcripts or recordings of his lectures contributes to the effectiveness of his teaching, then it's part of his job and not something for which students should be double billed.
One might even make the argument that by offering his lectures for private sale, Schrag is actually in competition with NC State.
I'm not saying that he should or should not offer audio of his lecture for an additional fee, but for the price, it's a steal.
Let's say he records the lecture digitally (say, with his ipod he already owned) so that he has to do minimal post processing of the lecture, and the initial investment in equipment is near-zero. Now, if he were to screen the content and make minor edits to clean up the file, you might expect him to spend 30 minutes on a 1.5 hour lecture. I'm assuming he's pretty efficient here, as the last time I recorded a book to CD for my daugter, it took about 20 minutes to combine and clean a book that finished at 7 minutes of audio (I Wish That I Had Duck Feet, if you must know). So 30 minutes to quick-review and prep, another 5 to upload. If he gets 80% of the cost of the product after processing fees and such, that's $2/purchase. Now, if you had to hire a professor at rack rates, you'd be looking at about $150-$350/hr, depending on the purpose (research vs expert witness) and the efficiency of the school's financial system (many have well over 200% overhead).
So for a typical lecture, this guy would would need to sell $200/hr x 35 min / $2 = 58 copies to break even on a "fee for service" basis. Maybe he's got some big lecture classes, but most classes above the freshman or sophomore level rarely have that many students total. I'd say, aside from the ehtical issues, $2.50 is a bargain.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?