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

Depends on the school

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Folks may be missing whats being said here

[RobertLTux]

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.

That's remarkably sensible

[rsilvergun]

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.

Falling costs in the free market

[udachny]

This is what drives prices down, prices for everything: freedom.

Freedom to try and freedom to fail, freedom to innovate, freedom to try and make your life better by providing an excellent product or services to a large subset of the population.

Freedom is what government takes away every day. Freedom is what various professional unions also try to take away, but they succeed when they get government on their side. Government protects the buggy and whip makers in every industry.

Relative freedom allows computers and electronics to fall in price or at least not to go up in price as the rest of the consumer products to with inflation going up (so in real terms the prices are still falling).

Freedom used provide Americans with best CHEAPEST health care in the world, where they paid very little money for routine things out of pocket and the rest they could insure against for 2 bucks a month. How was that a problem that needed to be 'solved' by government?

Freedom used to provide Americans arguably with best and cheapest education in the world as well, but then again, they had to pay for it out of pocket and if they did take loans, those were tiny compared to what happened once the government stuck its nose into that.

Medical care would be falling in price (in real terms, I am not talking about the inflation that gov't also causes because of destruction of real money by stealing people's freedoms to deal in real money) with more and more innovation coming on line.

Pills that replace costly surgeries, new types of treatments and diagnostics tools, computerisation... all of this makes things LESS expensive over time, not more expensive.

If government was in charge of building vide cards, well, first of all you wouldn't have any real innovation there, secondly prices would be constantly going up. Why? Because, they would tell you, those things provide you with more computing power.

Same with education. The technology makes education cheaper and more affordable, FREE MARKET DOES THAT, not government, not professional unions, not the whip and buggy makers.

Sure, this guy is complaining, but that's his problem, he IS the whip and buggy maker in the world of Ford and Lamborghini.

Academic copyright can be a bit bizarre

[edremy]

Read any contracts carefully before you sign

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.

Protect those buggy whips at all costs, boys!

[pla]

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.

Re:First defense of oppressors,

[hedwards]

That's primarily because reality has a left wing bias to it. Abortion, climate change, GLBT rights, economics, these are all things where the conservative agenda ignores research and fails to entertain the notion that there might be other possibilities going on there.

Which isn't surprising, seeing as conservatives in any system want things to remain as they were, and liberals want to progress into the future. So, of course, universities are going to appear to have a bias against conservatives, we don't yet know everything there is to know, which means that there's usually going to be a better way than what we previously knew.

Re:First defense of oppressors,

[hairyfeet]

"I believe the puppet on the left shears MY beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart....hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!" Bill Hicks.

The sooner that BOTH sides realize the whole "left/right" bullshit is just kayfabe to keep a handful of "super elites" in power and to force ever larger amounts of the wealth to go to them, your Goldman Sachs, your JP Morgans, you look and no matter if its a D or an R beside the name the same guys keep getting the sweetheart deals, the "too big to fail" heads I win, tails you lose deals, yet too damned many act like there is a difference between the so called left and right...who was it that was caught doing all the exact same spying shit the right was doing recently? So WTF is the difference, one will say nice things while he tramples on you while the other won't? That is like saying you have a choice because you can ask your mugger to wear your choice of sandalwood or wildflower aftershave while he mugs you!