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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?]"
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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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".
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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.
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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.
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" : LOL , more like threaten future royalties.