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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.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Maybe with a little academic freedom we can find higher education that isn't a left wing indoctrination institute.
If your university was a left wing indoctrination institute then you went to a very odd university. It must have had courses like:
Concurrency and Marxism.
Vector calculus and the worker will rise.
Small signal analysis and the evil capitalist pigdog.
Did you also start each lecture in "Partial Differential Equations" with a rousing chorus of "The Red Flag"...?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
[Just like their graduate students?]
In the U.S., graduate/research assistants generally aren't even considered employees under the law. Universities use the "they're students, not employees" thing to skirt even the most basic worker protections for grad assistants (similar to the way interns are exploited). They're so low that they can't even file for unemployment or count their work towards their Social Security (since they were never even "employed" in the first place, according to the law).
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
At Ayn Rand university, round-robin scheduling is strictly banned from the curriculum. The purpose of an OS scheduling algorithm must be to reward processes' individual merit, not to enforce discredited socialist concepts like "resource fairness" or "nonstarvation".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
governments can no longer afford to provide college education
It's more that they no longer want to pay for it, not that they can't afford it. California spends far less money on the UC system today than it did in 1985, for example, and it's not because the overall California budget has shrunk: they've just decided to spend the money on other things.
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".
It's not a question of "advertising" a course (though with some famous professors it might occasionally be).
The point is that the professor is preparing his/her own version of a course, making all the materials, and now the university will claim ownership over all of it. In years past, when a professor taught "History of Western Philosophy" or whatever at university X, he/she designed a syllabus, made up his/her course materials, etc. Then, if the professor had to move to another university for whatever reason, he/she would take those materials and offer "History of Western Philosophy" at university Y, essentially with the same stuff (perhaps modified a bit to curriculum standards at university Y).
Now, with MOOCs, universities are claiming ownership over much of the course materials created. So, if a professor leaves university X, university X could still keep using all that stuff for the course. Professor X might not even be able to use the stuff he/she created at university Y, since it may be under copyright, etc.
Obviously this is not a clear issue, since the work done for university X was done while the professor was an employee there, so I get how the university can claim some ownership.
On the other hand, for lots of early-adopter profs with online materials, they have invested a lot of their own time and energy doing something that hasn't been immediately adopted everywhere at minor universities. If they do all the work to make their own distinctive courses but then can't take that work with them if they have to move to university Y, it really can hurt their teaching ability at a new job.
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/
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!"
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.
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.
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!
Professors Say Massive Open Online Courses Threaten Academic Freedom
threaten their monopoly on information... it's RIAA and MPAA whining of a different flavor.
I'm inclined to disagree: If anything, the universities (who are attempting to seize the copyrights on course material, because the new 'MOOC' format now makes course material valuable in absence of the person who developed it) are the ones in the position of the RIAA (a trade group that represents the owners of copyrighted music, not musicians.)
Professors have never(at least since printing became remotely cheap; maybe back in the early medieval university where technical constraints imposed a nearly oral-history model of knowledge transmission you could make a case) had a 'monopoly on information', you can get courses in established subjects just about anywhere, and new-hotness research will be encumbered by Reed-Elsevier, not Dr. Somebody. What they object to is universities(or online courseware companies) obtaining a monopoly on their specific teaching of a course. This hardly seems shocking, given that they could end up having to license back their own coursework if they change employers...
Really rather similar to the position of a musician or band whose entire back-catalog is encumbered by that EMI contract they signed when they were small.
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.
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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"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.