Seeing that your executive committee meets today, I immediately send
and air this which I wrote this afternoon:

I have just returned to campus from a university learning technology
conference.  An administrator said in his presentation that his campus
is presently putting accounting courses onto Web pages so that it can
offer an on-line accountancy degree program.  He further said that, so
his campus will not be left “high and dry” if an on-line professor
leaves, they have established joint ownership of each course by the
university and by the professor who put her/his course onto the Web
page.  He also passingly noted that ownership issues must not be
slighted.

It seems likely that many universities will soon be creating online
courses to supplement their “live-professor” course offerings.  Some
on-campus students will enroll in these online courses.  The online
course can help address various mismatches of faculty resources and
student needs.  So, it will not be just a few huge universities who sell
their online courses nationwide; rather,  smaller universities have
begun doing it as well.

What about ownership of the online course for the professor who creates
it?  If it were just a few professors doing it for a large corporate
subsidiary of a large university, we might leave it to them to negotiate
favorable terms for themselves.  But if many professors will be doing
this, then maybe guidance in the form of a model contract needs to be
formulated by organizations like the ALSB and/or the AAUP.

In a relevant article about ownership of lecture notes (“Who Owns Course
Materials Prepared by a Teacher or Professor? The Application of
Copyright Law to Teaching Materials in the Internet Age” 2000 B.Y.U.L.
Rev. 165 ,2000), Georgia Holmes and Daniel A. Levin conclude that the
courts are sympathetic to the copyright interests of professors who
create courses, but that these matters are subject to faculty-professor
negotiation of the copyright ownership.

It seems to me that professors might contemplate holding out for a
better deal than the “joint ownership” I heard mentioned at the
conference.  Yes, it presently is true that universities are in control
of the hardware and software that it takes to digitalize the video of
the professor at the “white board”, etc., and thus have a basis for
asserting some ongoing right to use of the product.  But it is the
professor’s unique presentation style and material, worked out through
years of degree-work and postgraduate study, which should be more highly
valued.   If we want people to invest their efforts in becoming experts,
we should not establish an ownership regime that allows the expert to be
easily replaced by the expert system (online course) that the expert has
cooperated in creating.

It seems possible that a more finely-tuned property regime could be
devised. Some attention has been given to individual developments;  see
Dan Carnevale And Jeffrey R. Young, “Who Owns On-Line Courses? Colleges
and Professors Start to Sort It Out”, Chronicle of Higher Education,
December 17, 1999, Pg. A45.

But it might be good for ALSB members to reflect on the matter. Might it
be beneficial for the Baltimore conference to include a discussion about
negotiation of contracts for online courses?   Possibly the ALSB could
be in a position to advise the professoriate and to help shape
appropriate expectations on this very important development.

Further in the spirit of brainstorming, I suggest that such a discussion
could be enriched if ALSB members might, in the remaining weeks of this
semester, get a sense of the ownership patterns that may be taking shape
on their campus.  And might it be beneficial for our ALSB leaders to
touch base with the AAUP and the NEA about their efforts, to see the
extent that we might concur with them?  See e.g. Alison Schneider, AAUP
Seeks Greater Faculty Role in Distance-Learning Decisions, Chronicle of
Higher Education, June 25, 1999, Pg. A34.

-- Jim Turner


--

James R. Turner
Associate Professor
Division of Business & Accountancy
2332 Violette Hall
Truman State University
100 East Normal
Kirksville, Missouri 63501

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