What’s yours is mine: Copyright applied to web-based learning

Abstract

T his is the day of the independent student. Students want to get more education, but they have work, family, and social obligations that make regular class attendance problematic. When the university courses they wish to take a r e hundreds of miles or hours of commuting time away, the obstacles are simply too much to overcome. Enter distributed learning. When courses are offered to off-campus locations or students are allowed choice of time to interact with course materials, more students are able to complete coursework than ever before. Students who would have never considered taking degree programs now matriculate with enthusiasm. Universities build classrooms designed to accommodate videotaping and mount servers to deliver Web-based instruction. While emerging telecommunications and information technologies have the potential for reaching more students, the use of these technologies to create electronic courseware raises delicate policy issues. University faculties have traditionally been told that they own the copyright to their lecture notes, tests, handouts, articles, and other materials. These items are considered to be products of their intellect--sweat of the brow. Despite the fact that the thought process may have taken place in a university office and university libraries may have contained the works that were consulted in the process of creation of lecture notes or course syllabi, the tenets of academic freedom and independent thought have made universities loath to assert a claim of copyright on faculty production. With the advent of Web-delivered instruction, however, the balance of ownership has changed. No longer does the professor contemplate and write in academic solitude. No longer is access to library materials the most significant contribution made by the university in the development of courses. Because the creation of highquality digital courseware often requires considerable investment on the part of the university, the university does not automatically allow faculty members to claim sole ownership of the intellectual property of their own course materials. In an era of distributed learning, professors seldom are responsible for 100% of the creation of online courses. The creation of courseware for distributed learning is a team effort. Distributed learning is a significant investment on the part of the university, and one from which the university would like to recoup its costs-i f not more. Knowing that distributed courses can reach a much larger market than campus-based courses, universities do not want to spend the development dollars to create these courses if the institution will not reap the potential benefits of having the developed courseware available for future semesters, at least. In the past, if faculty members took their overheads with them when they moved to other jobs, the result was not debilitating to the curriculum. If a university sinks substantial resources into the creation of Web courseware through which crucial courses are offered, however, the impact of losing access to this courseware could be devastating. If the courseware is of such high quality that other universities license it, then the issue of royalties raises its head. What is good for the goose may not appeal as much to the gander. Because faculty members contribute a significant portion of their instructional effort into redesigning courses for distributed delivery, professors may balk at university pressure to prepare online courses if they cannot take the fruits of this development to another institution, should they eventually leave. If the faculty member can own traditional lectures, why not electronic course materials as well? The university rebuts that it contributed a significant portion to the development of the course, and the course was developed on university time using university facilities, so the university should own the exclusive rights to the developed course materials. Is there no common ground here? Must this be a win-lose proposition? The University of Nor th Texas found a way to encourage development