Intellectual property and academic freedom seen as threats by online education (Video)

June 17th, 2013

Peter Nolan

While massive open online courses, commonly known as MOOCs, have made dramatic changes in ways of delivering education to many along with lower costs, their critics have been increasingly vocal. University faculty in particular has criticized what they see as the potential for MOOCs to diminish educational quality and the role of professors in providing valuable education.

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Intellectual property clashes have now emerged in the fight for academic freedom. Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and author of No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom, told fellow university professors at the annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) if faculty lose the fight for academic freedom “being a professor will no longer be a profession or a career.” Nelson told the group “Higher ed will be service industry, that’s it.”

Professors whose work leads to inventions have had to negotiate patent-pending agreements on intellectual property with their teaching institutions. After the 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Stanford v. Roche, that stated inventions are first granted to the inventor and not the inventor’s institution. Nelson told the group that now, might be under pressure to sign away their right to original content for online courses offered. “Copyright, I think, is going to be increasingly under assault – it’s very clear from what’s happening across the country for online teaching materials.”

Who Owns The Work?

In response to the ruling and faculty backlash at the rise of online course growth, institutions have reinforced the language they use in present patent rights agreements with their faculty. As an example, the University of Pennsylvania is preparing a no compete agreement for its faculty that will prohibit them from designing any courses for outside educational sites or entities. Nelson pointed out, “The logic in that does not limit itself to online courses.”

“There’s no need for universities to own the online course you create,” Nelson told the group. “All the university needs is a contract from you saying they can use it in different ways…”

“I made it, it’s mine – it’s my business what happens to it,” he continued. “If the university was deciding what the future was of something that I’d written, that would eviscerate the whole thing.”

Nelson, a past president of the AAUP, said intellectual property issues plus recommendations for action will be discussed in his new report on faculty concerns that will be published by the AAUP and distributed by University of Illinois Press, by the end of the year. Nelson offered that these recommendations are controlled by the idea that academic freedom “goes the distance, from the idea to the thing itself.” Protections for academic freedom should be a part of collective bargaining agreements, even if it is at the expense of salary increases.

Select recommendations will be available on the AAUP website by fall.

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