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?]"

Comments

Re:First defense of oppressors,

[serviscope_minor]

Maybe with a little academic freedom we can find higher education that isn't a left wing indoctrination institute.

If your university was a left wing indoctrination institute then you went to a very odd university. It must have had courses like:

Concurrency and Marxism.

Vector calculus and the worker will rise.

Small signal analysis and the evil capitalist pigdog.

Did you also start each lecture in "Partial Differential Equations" with a rousing chorus of "The Red Flag"...?

Re:First defense of oppressors,

[Trepidity]

At Ayn Rand university, round-robin scheduling is strictly banned from the curriculum. The purpose of an OS scheduling algorithm must be to reward processes' individual merit, not to enforce discredited socialist concepts like "resource fairness" or "nonstarvation".

Re:First defense of oppressors,

[captbob2002]

How about instead we just focus on facts, not ideology in education.

But facts have a well known liberal bias.