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Professors Say Massive Open Online Courses Threaten Academic Freedom
McGruber writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education has the news that American Association of University Professors (AAUP) believes that faculty members' copyrights and academic freedom are being threatened by colleges claiming ownership of the massive open online courses their instructors have developed. The AAUP plans this year to undertake a campaign to urge professors to get protections of their intellectual-property rights included in their contracts and faculty handbooks. According to former AAUP President Cory Nelson, 'If we lose the battle over intellectual property, it's over. Being a professor will no longer be a professional career or a professional identity,' and faculty members will instead essentially find themselves working in 'a service industry.' [Just like their graduate students?]"
They'll get over it when enough people ignore them :)
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Where I went to school the students always owned their own research. That's not always the case. Go to a University known for good research.
Claim freedom is lack of. Claim right is wrong, claim truth is lies. Not news.
Maybe with a little academic freedom we can find higher education that isn't a left wing indoctrination institute.
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'nuf said?
I love how professors can claim copyrights on research done with my tax dollars.
They're not claiming the existence of MOOCs threatens academic freedom, but that the universities' IP grab, claiming ownership of course materials in order to license them to for-profit firms like Coursera, does so. The traditional IP agreement is that universities own a share of patentable inventions developed using university facilities, but do not own copyrights on materials, such as books, articles, course slides, tutorials, presentations, etc. produced by professors, which are supposed to be free of any university legal interference.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've participated in a few 'MOOC's in the past, and have thought about a few more. The ones up until now all seem to be adaptations of courses offered by universities, and using the university's name recognition and NOT the professor's to attract students. It would be interesting to see how many people would be attracted to a class by "Dr. Joe Schmoe" and not "XXX 200 from Harvard University as taught by Dr. Joe Schmoe".
Will schools allow instructors to advertize their affiliation in the descriptions of their courses? Will sites like Coursera be allowed to group by university courses which aren't actually taught at those institutions, just taught by people who work there?
Also, this really seems more about the schools threatening academic freedom, not the 'MOOCs'.
we are looking at a couple things
1 a School claiming copyrights on a teachers work (possibly preventing said teacher from posting the course on a free site)
2 folks wanting to get courses for free (maybe so that they know the material before doing the course for credit/paid??)
what i would do as a teacher is make sure that the vids/materials have several logos through out the course.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Professors Say Massive Open Online Courses Threaten Academic Freedom
threaten their monopoly on information... it's RIAA and MPAA whining of a different flavor.
[Just like their graduate students?]
In the U.S., graduate/research assistants generally aren't even considered employees under the law. Universities use the "they're students, not employees" thing to skirt even the most basic worker protections for grad assistants (similar to the way interns are exploited). They're so low that they can't even file for unemployment or count their work towards their Social Security (since they were never even "employed" in the first place, according to the law).
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/the-mooc-moment-and-the-end-of-reform/ - discusses that MOOCs haven't really been tested in terms of how good they are at educating people. The article also suggests that the push for MOOCs is coming because governments can no longer afford to provide college education, so by pushing to an online model, they can shrink the college sector. They still fulfill their responsibility of "educating people" - but they don't have to pay for all those expensive bits like college buildings and academics. The article suggests that a small number of people will get a "traditional premium education" which costs an arm and a leg and where they get to interact with an academic directly. The majority of people though will get their education in a way similar to how IT vendors do certification today. Students self study from MOOCs and then book themselves in for exams taken at authorized testing centers. Anyway the article is a lot more detailed - but the push for this stuff is coming because it's a quick way for governments to cut a lot of spending whilst claiming to be embracing "the revolution in education".
Academic freedom is something most professors are hardly in a position to speak of. In my own college courses, students were afforded very little opportunity to think freely if they wished to get grades that would sustain their scholarships and academics-based assistance. And this was at a right-wing private university, where I caused endless arguments in one of the few "academically free" courses I took for having libertarian views (much to the amusement of the professor, who successfully masked his own politics to encourage discussion, but in private, I found him to be a likely independent or (L|l)ibertarian rather than a Republican or Democrat). I've heard it gets even worse in such ways at the more common liberal-dominated universities, where one of my friends reported a class began with the professor announcing on the first day that if anyone was a Republican, they may as well leave right now and drop the class because they would be given a failing grade if they were discovered.
Contrast this with my online courses that I took, where I found that instead of sitting through a lecture where a professor stood on his soapbox for an hour, I could actually craft proper responses to queries and interact much more openly in ways that fostered an environment where people could learn from each other as well as just whatever the instructors' opinions expressed happened to be.
Most professors, when referring to "Academic Freedom", usually mean "freedom for professional academics". I'm not sure the ivory tower deserves the protection it has enjoyed for so long at the expense of students' ability to actually use their minds.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Guy's right. We're all basically being reduced to cogs in a machine. There's a really tiny group of super geniuses that will do the basic research. Maybe a few hundred thousand out of 6 billion. The rest of us will be replaced by robots and software. The fun part is sitting back watching all the rubes convince themselves their part of that tiny fraction of geniuses and that this doesn't apply to them.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What it really is affecting their freedom through tenure to do whatever they please rather then trying to serve the public as they should be by teaching. I hope this kills the concept of tenure, having absolute job security is analogous to having absolute power, IMHO.
I go out of my way to complicate the simple things, so that I can simplify the complicated things.
How many university professors will now change their mind about imaginary property and how many will still claim, "but if only we can tweak it thusly, for my benefit, it'll be all better?"
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A number of years ago I worked with a professor who was writing a textbook. I wrote a quiz engine and a question bank to use with it. The professor owned the copyright to the textbook. The university owned the electronic stuff I developed, both text and code, even though it was an adjunct to the text.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
....when the cases were going through the courts about the protections of the legal rights to works produced by employees in other fields (programmers jumps right to mind) there was no support or protection for them, or for anyone who works for anyone but themselves. In just about every case of which I can think, the person cutting the check owns the rights to the work for which they paid.
Suck it up, academia nuts. This is life in the big, bad, modern world. No whinging allowed.
Welcome to the 1980s. The world no longer needs people to stand in front of a group of 20 year olds and read a book to them.
That said, plenty of classes do benefit greatly from a live instructor. But virtually any "core curriculum" class really only requires a professor as the equivalent of a janitor - Count the filled chairs, sweep in the homework every week, polish the doorknobs and desktops, refill the quiz dispenser, and do a quarterly inspection of the knowledge sieves.
So the real question here needs rephrasing - Instead of figuring out how to pay professors for "producing" the same course material year after year when we have the ability to completely automate that, how about:
1) Find the "best" professor for each class in the world, buy the rights to his materials and make that "The" foo-101 course,
2) Refocus the in-person college experience around classes that actually involve thought rather than rote, and
3) Use the savings to cut tuitions back to a level that doesn't leave people in debt for the first 40 years of their professional careers.
I know, I know... Crazy talk.
/ Player Piano.
What a load of crock. Under Cory Nelson's definition the only 'professionals' are professors. Most of these guys are paid by the state, which means US. It has always irked me that they took their salary and then patented and copyrighted the work they were paid to do by the public. Now they are whining that their institutions are treating them like the rest of us professionals are treated. I still think it is wrong that the institution can claim ownership of the fruits of public money, but the way Texas is treating it's universities funding-wise (and I imagine other states as well), the universities have to seek other sources of revenue, in this case it is coming from perks long held by professors and so is a net zero impact on the rest of us.
It IS a service industry. Get over it and start competing.
And some things they do are.
a overload of required classes (some even still have swim tests and PE classes that you have to pay universities prices for)
makeing interns pay full price for credits for there work.
ripping pages of out books in classes to stop people from buy a old copy of book for class. Have the page ripped out before hand you get a lower grade.
upping the number credits to get a degree.
Forcing people to live in dorm with room mates and even shared bathroom for a full floor at a price that costs more then renting on your own (year round).
makeing transfer students retake OUR math and other gen eds. Some states had to pass laws saying that they must take (community college credits)
required classes that fall in the way that you end taking 5 years for a 4 year degree.
Some schools force you to buy there laptop (that is not that much of a good deal or does not have the power for all kinds of classes)
High priced and or low priced low max mini-med insurance that if you get really sick does not help you at all.
some fully majors that should not be at an university and or should be 4 years.
Soon professors will need talent agents....
Those professions still exist. Professors will still be required. Maybe the weaker ones will get weeded out, that's all.
If you were a professor and all you did was teach, then you deserve to be in trouble. My best professors were all involved in independent research and sought to get published and get our (us students') names attached to as many projects as we could so we would have a full resume. I didn't go to a large university, yet my professors managed to understand this is what we were supposed to be doing with our time there. College is not the 13th grade.
The very earliest beginnings of what is now ( still ) known as "universities" lay in Athens, in the Stoa where Aristotle taught. I can not remember having heard or read any of the "teachers" emitting whatsoever claim to the "rights" or "ownership" of the materials they taught. Another forefather of the universities is the model that Greek physicians had for teaching: the student would pay for the education, and be able to earn a living from his trade by letting those patients pay who could afford it. His craft, however, was to be put without discussion, without payment, to the disposal of the poor. Moreover, the future doctor would oblige himself, under oath, to accept any pupil wishing to learn the same trade, as long as the pupil was apt.
The first time we had, within universities, claims to truth and property was in the first "real" universities - "real" because they were the first ones to sport the name "Universitas" - of the high Middle Ages, in Europe. These claims came not from the educating personnel, they originated within the then and there omnipotent Roman Catholic church. It took us 600 years to get rid of that domination. Do we want to go back to the dark dungeons we came from ? I suppose not. Therefore, the AAUP's stance is not only ridiculous. It is condemned to die where it belongs: forgotten by all, in the last ditch.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I will give Professors some slack as soon as they stop being assholes and publishing their own textbooks every semester and sell them for $250 with a requirement that you must have it for their class.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yes, but speaking as a professor, this is not a case of academic freedom and I get _really_ fed up with academic unions claiming "academic freedom" for everything regardless of whether or not it is. Violation of academic freedom would the a university telling me that I had to use material X for teaching or that I could not do research on Y.
This is a simple question about owning the intellectual property rights on material produced. Frankly the way I think this should be is that I own the copyright but the university has a permanent license to use any material I generate for education of its own students. Since academic careers are built on reputation it's my moral rights - to be associated as the author of the material - that I care more about. I put all my material under a CC NC-BY-SA license. If 100k people found it useful enough to study from it and learn some particle physics I'd consider myself to be doing really well at the education part of my job!
The only people who think professors are some entitled class are ... professors. You provide a service, for pay, just like a doctor, or lawyer or barista.
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake just because you have a PhD. I know that's what all the other PhDs told you when you joined the club, but reality is knocking on your door.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Yes, to keep that serf alive so you can work him to death.
(you gotta) blow you heart out for freedom's sake, run yourself into the ground
(you gotta) blow you heart out for freedom's sake, run yourself into the ground
(you gotta) blow you heart out for freedom's sake, run yourself into the ground
(you gotta) blow you heart out for freedom's sake, run yourself into the ground
it's either robber barons trickling down or bureaucrats pushing you around
(you gotta) blow you heart out for freedom's sake, run yourself into the ground
hey, Mr. Rockefeller,
you were not born in a state of nature
where life is miserable, poor, nasty, brutish and short
where other human beings are hunted for sport
it's either robber barons trickling down or bureaucrats pushing you around
(you gotta) blow you heart out for freedom's sake, run yourself into the ground
I'd say I feel sorry for professors who feel threatened by the online education courses, but only because I feel sorry for anyone who refuses to find a better solution that to file for IP rights for their teaching material and processes. That's just going to create yet another money-making outlet for patent trolls and their lawyers. Everyone loses that game except the lawyers.
Build a better business model and get with the program, sirs and ma'ams.
"Courage is being afraid to do the Right Thing, and doing it anyway."
I don't own the code I create for my employer. I am not free to post it on the internet, publish it, give it away or sell it.
Just another market segment whose profit model was destroyed by the Internet. Just as no one should pay for a Classified Ad when Craigslist is free, in the future very few will pay for a University education (at least for most undergraduate courses) when the same or better education can be had online for free.
Oh, they'll linger for a while, as centers for research, semi-pro football teams, and scams for high school graduates to get their parents to pay for 4 years of drunken hookups, but the writing is on the wall, and the smaller and more marginal schools will start closing a lot sooner.
Tenure is going away for just about all non-superstars (think Nobel Prize winners and the like, and those that can bring in $1 million+ in hard money research projects annually.) The very best university professors will have more marketing opportunities. Mediocre or worse professors will have to find other employment.
Higher education is about to go through a huge upheaval. Adapt or enjoy your unemployment check.
The academics true fear:
Online courses = less jobs in academia.
Sensors indicate the presence of Bratva.
There are people involved in providing those decreasing cost services, you know, HUMAN BEINGS? These are running themselves into the ground. There are an army of HUMAN BEINGS running themselves into the ground for their pittance meanwhile costs for necessities like food, clothing and shelter do not decrease like the services that these HUMAN BEINGS provide. You suck their life-blood.
You look down from your glass-walled high-rise office upon all the "human ants" in the streets scurrying about engaging in heart-killing dollar chasing while you think yourself a god, lord and master over other HUMAN BEINGS. If you think yourself better that the rest of us, what you are doing is calling yourself something other than human. Laws protect only humans and thus unwittingly you remove yourself from the protection of those laws. That is why you need a private army of thugs from SADF to Spetznaz to protect you from reality.
"Reality has a left-wing bias"?
I would ask if you realize how ridiculous that sounds, but I suspect the irony is lost on you.
Freedom used provide Americans with best CHEAPEST health care in the world
Well, you'll be happy to know you still have the freedom to get those same "best" health care, for the same cheap price today.
And thanks to the Internet (that totally isn't based on prior government funded research ::covers ears:: la la la I can't hear you), I can prescribe that wonderful and cheap treatment to you right now. You ready for the prescription? Here it is: sleep on it, walk it off.. That's the "best" health care back in the day. Enjoy.
and the rest they could insure against for 2 bucks a month
No, they pay for 0 dollars, because the insurance companies simply reject covering those them deem unfit. But you're right, it's still the "best" and "cheapest" they could get!
Freedom used to provide Americans arguably with best and cheapest education in the world as well
Only if by "American" you're talking about white males for the first 100 years or so of the nation's founding.
It wasn't until after the civil war, after government started investing into education that the US propelled itself from a backwater ex-colony to industrial superpower.
Is really the best union.
I wish them luck with this. Maybe it will lead to more reasonable employment contracts for the rest of us.
I had to get out my violin.
For years the Universities have required students to take courses that have nothing to do with that which they are studying. For years, students have had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for something which should range in the hundreds. For years, corporations have sued people over intellectual property, unreasonably. For years, Colleges and Universities have claimed ownership over terms like Doctor or Engineer. Now, they are upset because it is happening to them.
They created their own problems, and now they ask for help from the very community that they alienated.
Personally, I own my material, and if the universities / web sites do not. If they don't like it, then I will put up my own web site, and that will be the end of that.
I have faith that coursera will figure this out. They seem like heavy hitters in this space, for the good of the universe. Check em out!
Oh yeah, and fuck the universities. No one cares about them making money. Seriously??
When a group of people say, "massively open X will threaten Y freedom!" ... what they are really saying is, "massively open X will actually increase Y freedom, but it will also threaten our pleasantly feathered nests!"
About 20 years ago I was in graduate school for software engineering. I was taught the various methodologies in depth: my professor literally wrote the book on requirements analysis/design used in most graduate programs. Heck, we even had Peter Coad (the father of OOA/OOP) guest lecture for us.
I took that knowledge with me into the workplace where I used personal computers with this new-fangled thing called "Windows" installed on it. Graphical UI's were fairly new (to the non-UNIX/workstation crowd), and software was horribly written back then (Lotus 1-2-3 or Wordperfect for Windows, anyone?)
As a 'software engineer', I quickly realized that the old methodolgies for developing DOS-based (single-tasking) apps just didn't work in a multi-window, multi-tasking UI. On my own, I started working to integrate several of the cutting-edge methodologies I'd leaned into a new metholdology that would support the new reality of Windows-based operating systems and UI's.
The upshot of all this is that I thought I could best pursue this direction at a university. I spoke to the department head of the Computer Science/MIS department. She thought it was a "wonderful and innovative idea" and she would LOVE to have me pursue developing a new hybrid methodology as part of a Ph.D program.
However, I quickly found out that anything and EVERYTHING I developed while pursuing a graduate degree would be owned - outright - by the university. And that extended beyond the subject of my doctoral project, and included anything I developed on my own, with my own resource and on my own time. The department head provided an insane explanation of this policy by saying "well, from our position the education and experience you gain while enrolled will ENABLE you to do the work, even if on your own time, therefore the university gets first right of ownership".
Needless to say, I immediately revoked my application to grad school on the spot, and didn't set one foot in a classroom or university facility after that. While I hold no illusions that my idea would have been the end-all, be-all of software engineering methodologies, who really knows what might have happened?
But the bigger point is this: How may others, just like me, have decided to abandon their academic goals because of this problem? What have we lost because someone who may have had the next big idea gave up because they didn't want to work themselves into the ground, only to be treated as a contractor and have all their works (and financial benefits from said works) "stolen" from them?
This is pervasive within the American academic system. Nearly every school I talked to had the same policy, so I gave up. And for those of you who think "well, go find somewhere else to pursue your work and avoid universities", think about this: big ideas require big efforts. Time, money, resources. If you're not independantly wealthy you have three options: have someone else provide your resources, have someone else fund your work, or find another job and pursue your dream on the side.
But guess what: most companies have the EXACT SAME POLICY! I've worked for three different companies since my aborted grad studies that required you to assign ownership, copyrights, etc. for ALL works/products/whatever developed while employed - regardless of whether it was done on company time or on your own, with your own resources. And don't start by saying "get a contract beforehand excluding that provision" because it was a condition of employment - don't agree, you don't get hired.
So the same thing happens in the private sector as in the academic sector: people with good ideas give up on ever pursuing them because they will likely have a company, or a school, or someone else steal their work and all the benefits/compensation that result.
And even if you somehow magically get past an academic/employment clause that gives someone else the rights to your work, you can bet money that some patent troll (or trolls) will come along and steal anythin
Freedom used provide Americans with best CHEAPEST health care in the world
Cite?
Freedom used to provide Americans arguably with best and cheapest education in the world
Cite?
Medical care would be falling in price
Evidence?
If a school is offering online classes as part of their "normal" curriculum, and if you use the university's resources to produce something while being paid by the university - does this become a work for hire situation?
in the economics of running a college (in the United States at least) "academics" isn't at the top of the "income generating list" - my "traditional big college university" income list = 1. housing, 2. alumni donations, and sometimes 3. athletics/research. Which means actually "educating" students isn't the primary mission for a lot of schools - so it follows that the professors/instructors become a necessary evil - i.e. a "cost" to be constrained or a "resource" to be utilized.
(of course at smaller schools student tuition - and government grants/loans - are the main source of income but that is a different subject)
online classes are great for actually educating people, and can enhance a school's "brand" (which is the approach I'm seeing with a lot of coursera classes) - so I don't see free mooc's as a huge threat to the acdemic status quo - but "ownership" probably leans towards the university.
of course nothing is stopping an enterprising instructor from creating mooc's on their time, with their resources, and with their name attached...
in the "I don't work at the MIT admissions office" category - I don't think 12 years of OpenCourseware has had a negative impact on M.I.T.'s admissions numbers ...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
The fundamental problem isn't that the university gets paid for something the professor has created, but that the university gains control over it.
For example, if a professor comes up with an unpopular or controversial theory, if the university owns the rights to any works (s)he has created, they may also have the ability to veto publication. They may well wish to do this in order to avoid controversy over race/gender/climate politics.
Lots of people create IP at someone else's expense, and find that that someone else has majority control of that IP afterwards. There is nothing wrong with this situation, so long as each individual has the right to create IP at their own expense, and keep full control if they so desire.
These professors whine outrageously, but if the national education system worked effectively, the state would pay to have first class teaching materials created for each subject, and these materials would be made available to everyone with an interest in learning that subject. Teachers/university peeps would then be tasked with helping students learn and understand the information in the externally created material- not create such material themselves.
Obviously the very best teachers would still be created their own exercises and examples, but no pupil/student would be held hostage to the quality of their teacher.
The Fabian model of universal schooling for the under 18/16 is completely inappropriate in our modern age of computers and mass communication, and needs a massive over-haul (which won't happen while monsters are allowed to rule over us). Optional further education is in even greater need of being dragged from its medieval roots into the 21st century. The best students teach themselves from the best materials available, even when they are on formal courses. For them, their teacher is either a neutral influence, or a hindrance. The people 'concerned' with the quality of their teacher are either very lazy or very unskilled, and think the teacher is there to do the thinking for them.
Morons will say "dribble, but you can ask a teacher questions, dribble". However, 5 milliseconds of thought proves this could NOT work unless only a tiny fraction of the class ever bother with this act. Questions may be asked by smart bored students for their own amusement. They may be asked by lazy hopeless students in the hope that by doing so, the student magically gains knowledge. Occasionally they just may be asked by someone in the middle for some true enlightenment, but this group would gain far more from decently written teaching materials to which they can refer.
PUT SIMPLY- the people creating the first class materials should NOT be the people teaching from these materials UNLESS the teaching is done by universally available reference video lectures that are the equivalent to text-books.
And to make my point even clearer, here's an actual example of the problem. England is currently re-jigging the exams given to under 16s so that they will actually attempt to test real knowledge in the subjects they test for the first time in 15-years plus. I read a forum post from a mother freaking out that her self-confessed non-too-bright child will be made to take these exams in a few years time. She recognised that the current program of assessments and politically correct exams would allow her son to gain excellent grades even with almost no ability in the core subjects. She recognised that exams that went back to needing knowledge of maths to get a good grade in maths, for instance, would lead to her son failing or scoring a very low grade.
In the 'Wizard of Oz' movie, the Wizard gives the thickie scarecrow a piece of paper declaring he has a diploma, pointing out that you don't need brains in a society where the point of education is NOT learning but owning that piece of paper. These academics are in mortal fear of an education system re-shaped to be about actual education and learning, rather than tens of thousands of dollars and years of time exchanged for a piece of paper.
The Fabians try to convince the sheep of the West that no-one in the West needs brains, when all the real thinking now occurs in places like China, and the West can simply get their services from there. The dumbing down of the people of the West is a very deliberate tactic. On the doorstep of the USA, for instance, the Chinese are going to build the next wonder of the world with the canal across Nicaragua, while the US humiliate
Maybe this will bring down the over priced textbooks.
If they made it on school time, using school facilities I think it's fair to say the school should be the owner.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Just because worker rights are dead and continue to die as the corporate dominance grows doesn't mean we should blindly accept today's situation in the majority of professions.
The few holdouts, unsurprisingly, are professions with functioning UNIONS. Despised and resented by those who lack union backing and even some who do; corporate propaganda is unmatched and it wouldn't surprise me if professors are the last demographic to be enslaved.
Everything is NOT business. These are SCHOOLS. When are people going to realize this. MBAs are not high priests! Stop having your world view dictated by these false prophets! The history of economic success is not a result of modern MBA thinking being applied to all aspects of life.
So called "I.P." should only ever belong to employees and be non-transferable. Save your boss billions with your brainchild and you deserve have a job for life (if not the bonuses the bosses receive.) Come 50-60 years old, they'll fire you saying "What have you done for us lately?" Americans especially need to go to these 3rd world nations and see the walled communities next to slums where there is no upward mobility - it is their future...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The $300K a year full professor at a top college . Of course that takes 12 years of elementary schooling 10+ years of college and grad school, and another 7 years of stressful tenure work to reach that plateau. Universities have used this exclusivity to charge costs that rise much faster than general inflation. And this is being threatened now by new educational technology.
These people for decades if not centuries lived well and were totally shielded from market forces. It is high time the reality pierce the firewall lined with plaques.
==//==
A better question might be, why are those so opposed to teaching Darwinism, so keen on applying it outside of the biological realm (i.e. Social Darwinism)?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
When I work for an employer, the IP I create belongs to the employer. If I was a contractor, then the IP I create when working for them belongs to me. Now it comes down to "Are Professors employees or contractors?" Contractors need a business licence, and are subject to business laws. So Dr. Fred needs to be Dr. Fred Inc. Businesses are taxed as businesses, and are contracted (no tenure). So I will ask again, IF they are employees, and they want monetary control of the IP they create when working for an employer, then it would set a new precedent (and I would see gain too). Expect the courts to shut them down hard. My software gets spread far and wide across the internet too, and I would argue that it gets picked apart and reformulated more than their lectures.
In the natural sciences and engineering, profs are generally paid a lot less than they would be in industry. In my case, choosing academia over industry meant a more than 10-year lag before my inflation-adjusted income even caught up to what I had been making in industry when I made the decision.
To compensate for this, we often retain intellectual property rights over and above what someone in industry would have (and yes, I made sure this was in my contract before taking my position). It's about as free-market as it gets - a substantial part of your potential income is tied to producing new knowledge / IP that someone else is willing to pay for. Like bonuses, except with a clear and direct tie to the market. This is a major incentive to not just come up with new knowledge, but to disseminate it for the benefit of society. There are the usual imperfections inherent in defining "benefit to society" as "what the market will pay for", and from a more socialist perspective there are valid arguments that a wider range of benefits should be incented, but if you believe at all in the free market the arrangement is pretty much unassailable. If you want to take that away, you're going to lose many of the best researchers into industry, where they'll be paid twice as much for working on the next Viagra instead of trying to cure cancer.
If they cannot rise to the challenge of a sea change in the way
learning is done, they deserve to be unemployed, tenure be damned.
"Being a professor will no longer be a professional career or a professional identity, and faculty members will instead essentially find themselves working in 'a service industry.'"
I'm not seeing a problem here.
FINALLY a bunch of overpaid, piece of shit, non-enlightening, biased, indoctrinated, professors will be out of work!
No more will you shit on people's dreams :) HAHAHAHA I drop out of college and become and millionaire coding.
Now you just drop out of college and never come back :) you fagot fuck professors! I hope the online industry puts the 'professor' in a homeless shelter with NO identity
Leftwing, progressive basically means a repulsive, opporessive, reactionary elite ruling class. North Korea, Stalin, Saddam, China, and much of the West is very progressive, very left wing, particularly academia, and very oppressive.
About 95% of Professors vote and contribute to left wing causes and candidates. The group think is frightening, and very anti-science.
The idea that there are observable, quantifiable, and hereditary racial differences in intelligence, for example, is wished away. Even though Professor after Professor at places like Harvard have found this, actually discussing it as Richwine did (Profs Jencks and others signed off on his Phd Thesis) leads to purges. [For those not familiar, Heritage's Richwine wrote in his Phd Thesis that all social science points to Hispanics having lower average IQs than Whites, around 88 IQ to Whites 100. After this was known, Richwine was fired from Heritage, even though Harvard's Profs, 3 IIRC, had signed off on his work. Shamefully none of them defended his writings, which conform to EVERY single research done in the area. For the record, Ashkenazi Jews have the highest AVERAGE IQ at 115, followed by NE Asians just a few points lower, with Blacks in Africa lowest at around 70, Blacks in the US with better childhood nutrition at around 85.]
James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, was fired from his position as Prof. Emeritus at Cold Spring Harbor for noting accurately that Africa has a low IQ population for which there is no remediation at present. Harvard's Larry Summers was fired for wondering and calling for research on gender differences.
Liberals and Progressives love evolution, but react with horrors when it is suggested accurately that human beings are still evolving, in response to environmental pressures, including climate, food availability, and social structures. Liberals and Progressives and the University itself has screaming fits when it is suggested that significant racial differences exist, and can be found over and over again by the Scientific Method. Satoshi Kanazawa was fired for his studgy showing that Black women on average were the least desired women by men of all races (including Black men); and Black men were conversetly found to be the MOST desired men by women of all races.
Liberals and progressives are married to a utopian, loony post-Christian ideology where "diversity" (non-White majority) equates with goodness, certain races "magically" contain greater levels of ability in all areas, courage, decency, wisdom, etc. [Morgan Freeman syndrome] and proven social science (Putnam's findings that diversity = mistrust, withdrawal, corruption etc) is rejected for fairly ridiculous post-Christian ideals of utopian globalism which lack even the tradition and majesty of real, not fast-food-processed, pseudo Christianity.
Why? Because liberals and progressives want constantly to display their moral superiority and post-Christian "saved" status instead of pursuing the truth on gender, racial, diversity, and other issues by science regardless if the truth is something they want to hear or not. This is why Liberals like Robert Redford bemoan science and technology and say they want to erase it and return to some mythical Garden of Eden. [Yes, Redford really said that.]
which was my experience of at least one chemistry prof at the end of the 70s. But yes, the first two years of most STEM courses need the core curriculum delivered by high quality 'lectures' - being full scale TV documentary productions, not just a talking head; otherwise what's wrong with a book? Obviously there needs to be someone available to dig you out of holes if you get stuck, but ideally the course will prevent most of that.
My problem is that an IT guy (Jack T.) at a community college stole many of my lessons, and put them through a copyright-protection service. After that, when I tried to use the same lesson at another school, it was deleted without notice. I was left standing in front of a class with blanks where my online lecture notes had been in our OCS (Online Courseware System.)
I complained, and the school's response was to threaten me with termination for violating copyrights.
There needs to be a criminal penalty for anyone comitting copy fraud.
The world is a complex place. We've had several things that held back are standard of living from going to heck in the first world. Two world wars that wiped out large portions of the populace and wrecked civilization helped. Moving our slave labor to China/India/Mexico etc also helped. But there are very real events going on right now that are going to crash the quality of life for those of us who've managed to obtain little things like shelter and a steady food supply. China/India/Mexico are industrializing and competing with you for food and fuel now. And Just because it took a little longer for the software to catch up than the doomsayers in the 80s doesn't mean we haven't lost millions of jobs to software. How many accounting clerks do you know? How many were there before Lotus 1-2-3? Better questions: how many employees does it take to run a sleeping bag factory that churns out 1 million bags/yr? 1000? 500? Try 100 (google it). Heck, just look at how much better Windows XP is than NT. How many IT jobs were lost when Microsoft software halved (or better) the rate at which it crashed.
Just because something bad took longer to happen than expected, doesn't mean it's not going to happen. Nice try though.
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Why should academics get any kind of 'special' professional treatment on this issue? Just because the university didn't enforce this rule before doesn't mean you get to whine over it now. I work for a national manufacturing corporation, as a designer, but I know that everything I create 'on the job' belongs to the company. That's why they pay you, to provide the talent, to be a resource they can draw from. If you want to develop online courses and keep the rights, do it outside of your day job as an independent contractor. Please come to grips with the fact that you are not a 'special' individual just because you teach kids all day. I think my work is pretty awesome, but I have no illusions that down the road the company may decide to change it to suit a new need or political strategy. That's why I have a separate, personal business, so that I can develop my own work without fear of copyright issues. Take what you've learned and move on.
reminds me of an old gf
If they created that content while being paid they excessive high salaries, then the college owns it. They better wake up... everyone is loosing their jobs and benefits. Time to put those God like professors in there place..... cut their pay and benefits now!
When was being a professor not a service industry job?