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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.
Sure you can, you just have to go to a right wing indoctrination institute. Lots of those around too.
How about instead we just focus on facts, not ideology in education.
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.
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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.
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"...?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
[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!
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".
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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/
No, what they plan to do is prevent the university's from claiming copyright on the coursework that they created.
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)
Interesting, but, you do realize that "left wing indoctrination" is what people in other countries call "education" right? Just because the facts don't back a conservative agenda does not make schools "left wing indoctrination institutes" it means that you're delusional.
Unless of course, serviscope, is right and the courses are titled like that.
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!"
and the for-profit college model in general. schools need to stop hiring MBA flunkies as their deans, and start focusing on academics again
My employer owns the copyright on work I produce on their time. What's different about universities.
Contracts, I suppose. So these professors should check their contracts before signing them.
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.
It IS a service industry. Get over it and start competing.
How about instead we just focus on facts, not ideology in education.
But facts have a well known liberal bias.
Sadly, because ideology directly affects what you consider to be 'facts'.
If people actually looked at facts, they might have to be faced with the idea that their ideologies are wrong. And people have no interest whatsoever in doing that, because their ideologies are Clearly Right, and those facts are Clearly Partisan spin.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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.
Er, this is about material created by professors -- that is, people being paid by the university.
You can be arrogant and correct at the same time.
"Facts" are rarely the *whole* truth, on either side of any debate.
In other words, everyone cherry picks for their own benefit.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Universtity of Phoenix online - it's a required class, my fiance left the school over it. We were both raised in a community that was 90ish% Mexican and were both treated poorly for not being one. We did not have the empowerment this class and others who have had it demand we accept that we had. The University of Delaware is famous for making it a requirement to participate in such training. They eventually backed out when it made huge amounts of news, but such things are creeping into colleges in the required curriculum since then and getting less attention.
No, avoiding it is harder these days than seeking it out.
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Liberals LOVE free speech until the second you say something with which they disagree
People like people who agree with them and dislike people that disagree with them, news at 11.
So by virtue of the university being "not an Ayn Rand entity", the relationship between a professor and a university is:
- we give you a salary
- you do whatever it is you fancy
- you sell the outcome of that effort to a third party
I don't see who gains from that - except the professor.
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?
So these professors should check their contracts before signing them.
Well, yes, that is the entire point of this story...
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.
Facts do have a liberal bias.
Not the modern definition of liberal, but the classical free thought version. The modern common use definition of liberal is all about indoctrination.
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everyone cherry picks for their own benefit
So much this. This is a major contributing factor to the left/right war we have going on that is dividing and conquering the people.
"Both" sides use their cherry-picked facts to justify government action to back them not realizing every government action is actually a loss for both sides.
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Actually I'd say its worth them fighting for it, frankly ALL creators should have the rights to their work and too often we've bought into this corporate bullshit that turns those that actually write and create into nothing but cogs while the publishers get everything.
I see this as no different than musicians getting screwed out of the rights to their songs, or game devs getting their ideas owned automatically by some big publisher like EA as "the cost of doing business". Well if more people would tell them to fuck right off a hell of a lot of our culture wouldn't be locked behind paywalls for the benefit of a few rich old white guys.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"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!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Not the way it is. They wanted me to sign a "technology transfer agreement" which basically said anything I do is theirs, forever. I declined. Now when you go as a freshman, they have you sign that along with a thousand other "agreements". This is when you show uip on campus. MOOCS are a plot by the right to destroy the university system which produces Knowledge They Don't Like, especially Science They Don't Like. I think we all know the right is basically fascist - and regards science with Soviet style disdain contempt and mistrust and we'll all be learning about Creationism and global warming denialism and Young Earth science and how Big Tobacco really got screwed by the government on that cancer rap when the universities fall. We'll have real vs right wing science and become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. Thank god for the rest of the world. But all of that that doesn't mean the universities dealt any more fairly with anyone they had at a disadvantage or had power over. They were extremely manipulative, exploitative and coercive when they ruled the roost. They malignantly jacked their tuitions up year over year because they passed non-bankruptcy laws which permitted them to saddle 18 year olds with lifelong debt as a way to finance their mushrooming administrator's head count and Big 5 sports programs. I 'd laugh at their fate if the thing that came next were effectively the end of America as a world leader. It's all greed. It's all greed and the banks and the lawyers that implement that greed, from the non-bankruptcy laws which permitted tuition inflation, to the indentured servitude being a TAs has become, to the removal of resources from teaching into research to inflate the school's prestige at the expense of students learning to the MOOCS who just want to turn learning into a transactional affair of dubious quality and to destroy science and humanities in the process. Everyone wants to get their while they can. This is a product of fear of being destitute when you're older. America has no serious old age security to speak of. In nations where there is a serious safety net, people are more relaxed, less greedy, less assholish, less selfish, less monstrous, more community minded. That is not America and never has been. Not until we've lost everything will we turn and look at ourselves and think.
Sacramento state also requires the 'white males evil' course for all students. I bet all California state schools do.
Lets make a complete list.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There is not a vast swatch of the population that hates people with education, there is one that's more than annoyed at the massive number of indoctrinated people and that the colleges are churning out Marxist. I've watched my best friend go from somewhere between liberaltarian and libertarian to Marxist in the span of a year since going to college. My own cousin made a 180 after college towards Marxism that after my aunt and uncle talked some sense in to him he admitted was wrong and can tell all about why he was wrong and that yes, it was instilled in him. He's still educated, he still has a job that requires the degree that he has, he's just no longer left-wing.
You're not helping your own statement. Meth use is very common in California, New Mexico, and Washington. People in trailer parks are more likely to be poor Democrats, but granted it's the right wing trailer park nut jobs that attract more attention per-capita. You have one or two of those nut jobs per trailer park and the other 30 or 40 trailers full fear them.
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Surely they would use a Random scheduler?
Though a left-wing university would certainly use some other Al-Gore-ithm
"Both" sides use their cherry-picked facts to justify government action to back them not realizing every government action is actually a loss for both sides.
And you use your cherry-picked facts to justify your ideology despite that it is trivially easy to point to a positive action by a government.
every government action is actually a loss for both sides.
No libertarian cherry-picking of facts in your post.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It was your "leftwing indoctrination institutes" assertion that started this whole thread. Practice what you preach, then people might take you seriously.
Otherwise, you're in no position to tell anybody else about the virtues of non-partisanship as you're not managing it yourself.
No, and this post is probably one of the best examples of why there aren't very many conservatives in education.
You're assuming that becomes most professors are self identified liberals that it is getting into the curriculum. That's rather unlikely, especially in the sciences. There's nothing that academics like more than being known as the guy that had a big new idea, the only thing that comes close is being known as the guy who disproved somebody elses big idea.
If an idea does not have a strong basis in reality, it tends to get discarded fairly quickly as the folks out there are gunning to disprove it.
The "evidence" you're pointing at is pretty much a non-issue. Of course there are going to be more liberals in academia, the conservatives tend not to remain conservatives very long when evidence and reality come into it. Either they reform their ways, or they can't get funding because none of their research pans out. Either way, they're out of the system in favor of people that are actually knowledgeable about the field.
I return the challenge - prove to me the government have ever done anything that wasn't at the expense of another.
It can't do anything but at the expense of another - that's why we should have it sparingly.
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