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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."
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.
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I think that $2.50 is a fair price for a lecture. Lets be realistic... most of the time that you miss class it is your own choice (or worse, your failure) to miss it. In that, the professor doesn't owe anybody his free time. Something like this does take time and effort beyond what is normally expected. Those times when I missed class in college I would have gladly paid $2.50 if it was something that I wanted to hear.
So... sure, make it a podcast. But keep the price at $2.50 and make all the profit himself. Students don't need any more excuse to be lazy, a good deal of them perfected the skill long ago.
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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).
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.
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.
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.
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