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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.
Selling lectures online. Brilliant!
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
If it isn't DRMed to hell this could be great, for example one could make techno-remixes of professors, ect.
Philosophy.
This sounds like the school equivalent of all those patents that take something common and add "on a computer". I was able to buy lecture notes for most of my classes in 1996. Admittedly, those notes were taken by someone paid to take the notes, and sold by the school not the professor, but still this doesn't seem particularly exciting or novel, just a natural progression. I do remember back then they printed the notes on this annoying red paper to make it more difficult to photocopy the notes, something tells me any measures on the web to prevent copying and sharing of these notes will be even less effective.
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.
Is banned in my classroom as is all other electronic devices except for ADA needs. I don't post the notes and I don't post the powerpoints. Why? Well, there is a direct correlation between bad grades and lack of attendance of lectures even if the notes and powerpoints are posted. I also found out that a teacher at another university was using my powerpoints with out attribution as his own work. AND what I say in class is my intellectual property. AND I don't want the David Hershowitz brown shirts holding the odd joke about US foreign policy during the Eisenhower era against me (actually happened).
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
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).
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned MIT's Open Courseware program (ocw.mit.edu). The goal is to have every class available online, and many have taped lectures for free, for anyone to see, not just students. I had a horrible differential equations professor, so I watched the OCW lectures from the previous term. It sure beat walking to class in the cold.
The professor isn't providing lecture notes for a fee. He's providing recordings of the lectures.
The U.K. educational system is apparently quite different from the system in the U.S. At the two universities I've studied at, only a few professors provide lecture outlines, and none that I know of provide full lecture notes. If you miss a lecture, it's your responsibility to get notes from another student. In the U.S., providing lecture notes is not part of a professor's job description.
Taking notes is an important skill. If you try to write down everything, you're going to get lost. You need to learn how to figure out what's important to write down and what's not.
Was it a Vietnamese class?
Why has nobody pointed out that the $2.50 is FAR FAR CHEAPER than the tuition money the students are paying for the original lecture in the first place??
"I've been thinking about this Mister Hand. If you're here and I'm here, doesn't that technically make it our time?"
$30 Off All Plans: Use code TRIPLESAWBUCK
Just two links:
... http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-046JFall-2005/LectureNotes/i ndex.htm
http://ocw.mit.edu/
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
Consider this: video recording of Introduction to algorithms class, notes, exams, assignments,
Free and apparentely available to everybody. Does somebody know other links to a projects that would be as good as this?
having videos of the lectures are a great idea, but I think he should try to get the university to pay for it instead of the students. non-native english speakers or students who get sick and can't attend lecture shouldn't be penalized. you only need to pay for the video equipment once, and in terms of the extra time it takes to make the videos, having the videos online will probably save him the time of answering many questions that students have later that could be answered by simply re-watching the lectures.
Didn't Thomas Dolby already do that?
SCIENCE!!!
... The idiots are ALREADY more creative.
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.
For example, my professor records his lectures in Organization and Management digitally. Half the
course runs online, and half is lectures. So he offers his lectures online through the same service
that we get the online tasks through. For free. I'd never pay for something I had paid for before,
or something the government paid for me(this applies in my case). Putting it online is not a hassle
worth $1 per download. Our University allows him to do it on his personal(but university) webspace,
with unlimited upload.
She: Hey, are you a traitor? Me: No, I'm atheist.
If he wanted to "help those that missed class, didn't take good notes, or from another country and have trouble understanding an English speaking Professor" he'd make them free. (This is assuming that everyone he's selling these lectures to is a student at the college he works at. I could easily see him selling the lectures to people not enrolled at the college)
I'm surprised he's actually allowed to do this with lectures he gives at the college. Sure, he gives the lecture, but who pays for the lecture hall, the seats, and his payroll? One could make the valid argument that he's being paid to give these lectures and no one is forcing him to record them (so it wouldn't cost him anything if he wasn't allowed to sell the tapes), so they must be free.
There are a lot of professors that record their lectures and make them freely available to help their students, this guy just seems to be trying to make a quick buck.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
With all due respect, I disagree strongly with your comment.
You said...
and what I say in class is my intellectual property
Repeat after me: copyright is not an absolute right.
Go ahead, repeat it: copyright is not an absolute right.
There is something called Fair Use. I should know, as I rely upon it when creating my podcast, [shameless plug] Life of a Law Student. In LoaLS I build upon my notes from the lectures I took part in at law school to create audio episodes explaining the cases and the law. I then make these episodes available, for free, to anyone who wants to listen and/or download. They are licensed as CC-Attribution and GNU FDL to enable others to build upon them freely.
Out of respect, I informed my profs and the administration what I was planning on doing before I started. Most thought it was a great idea or at least would not stand in my way. Unfortunately, I had one of my professors tell me that he only gave permission for his students to take notes for their own personal use, and so he wouldn't allow me to do LoaLS off of his class. I politely told him I wasn't seeking his permission because my Use was a Fair one and thanked him for his time.
Fair Use has four articulated prongs (although there are potentially more factors to balance).
Let's consider a student setting up a tape recorder and simply recording your lectures. (We'll set aside any Honor Code violations that explicitly give you the right to ban taping; we'll only deal with your "intellectual property" right.)
In summary, a student would likely have a legal right to record your lectures under Fair Use because three of the four prongs (and both of the important ones) would cut in their favor. If you would like make your lectures available for sale or distribution that might change the analysis. But the key thing is to disabuse yourself of this notion that your "intellectual property" is an absolute. Fair Use is explicitly codified in the Copyright Act because it is recognized that oftentimes the incu
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
Ha ha, no. It was an electrical engineering class, and worse, it was one of the required ones. I took it the next semester with a better prof.
Excuse, me, but who gets the fee for the lecture, the professor or the university? The students are paying tuition to be provided an education that fufills the requirements of course xyz (his argument that the student's tuition gets them the lecture in the classroom is bogus -- tuition is more than just his classroom time - otherwise, shouldn't distance classes and classes taught by a TA be less than those taught by a professor?).
Therefore, the lecture is already being provided to the students as part of the contract for taking and paying for the course. The ability to download said lecture is the same content, just in a different format.
I am assuming that it is the professor who is collecting the fee, but then that raises the question of whether he is producing said downloadable lecture using university equipment (recorder, internet, web server, etc.) and on university time or not. If he is deriving income from the download, then wouldn't that be using university resources for personal use?
Also, the question of $2.50 a lecture seems steep. Maybe not for one, but a 13 week class at 3 classes a week comes out to be 39 lectures or $97.50. It doesn't take too many students before the professor makes a nice little income on the side. If the professor teaches three classes with three sections each, well, that's a nice supplement to his income each semester.
Maybe not only the university should look into the use of school property for personal gain, but maybe the IRS should look into reportable income.
Well, first of all, this is a state school, and the professor is a Government employee. So state conflict of interest laws apply.
First, North Carolina State University permits faculty to own copyright in instructional materials: "NC State does not, however, claim ownership of faculty-created instructional materials or courseware merely because it requires faculty members to teach courses as part of their regular responsibilities."
However, the department has the option of taking title to such "Directed Works": "Directed works also include works created by faculty or staff in an institute, center, department, or other unit that, with approval of the Provost, has adopted rules providing that copyright in materials prepared by such faculty or staff in the course of their work with that unit vests in NC State and not in its creator. NC State holds copyright to Directed Works."
However, see Conflicts of Interest and Committment Affecting Faculty and Non-Faculty EPA Employees. "Activities requiring disclosure for administrative review ...
An EPA employee requiring students to purchase the
textbook or related instructional materials of the employee or
members of his or her immediate family, which produces
compensation for the employee or family member."
Provided that the professor made the proper disclosures and those disclosures are in his personnel file, he's probably OK. The university has the option of taking over this business from the individual faculty.
Policies vary with the school. The University of Michigan permits commercial note-taking services but prohibits faculty from selling notes. (This resulted in a note-taking startup, Versity.com, which was acquired by CollegeClub.com, which dumped the note-taking business to focus on entertainment content.) Yale is at the other extreme; they let faculty control their content. That's what you'd expect; state schools have to be much more careful about conflict of interest issues.
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
At UC Davis, the service is called Classical Notes. In this program, the professor does nothing at all, and may even be completely phobic of computers. Students apply for positions as note-takers, attend the lectures in question, and sell the transcribed notes for a reasonable price through Classical Notes, a division of the student government.
Given this background, and the fact that a $1 fee on the professor's part is by no means extortion, the article looks like a non-story to me. University professors have a lot of freedom in how they conduct their classes, and little services on the side like this are absolutely nothing to have a fit about.
... 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.
I wish some of my professors would have done this. Sometimes it would be because I missed a class, but mostly it would be because I would have an easier time demanding that the professor's lectures be coherent. I took many courses where the lectures were incomprehensible, but most people still passed because the professor was too lazy to make unique exams, so people just memorized the exam questions from previous years. (And most seemed to be happy about that, and complained about the professors who actually taught useful information and expected their students to understand it. Fricking children.)
http://outcampaign.org/
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.
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?