Category: Online Learning

Committee on Online Education Forming

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Senior Vice Provost for Undergraduate and Continuing Education Lynn Zimmerman spoke to the council about the creation of a new Faculty Advisory Committee on Online Education. Two weeks after the call went out in early March, seventy-six faculty had been nominated (both self-nominations and nominations by others) to serve on the committee. This body will advise the provost on shaping Emory’s goals and vision for online education, establishing standards and proposal guidelines for university-wide online course offerings (such as Coursera courses), reviewing and selecting proposals for university-wide online courses, and considering policy issues such as licensing, intellectual property, faculty workload, and compensation issues. “Our goal at this point is to create a balanced group that is very representative,” Zimmerman said, “We are thrilled to have such a deep pool to draw from.”

 

 Online courses and intellectual property

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In the January meeting, Alan Cattier, director of academic technology services, described to the Faculty Council new questions about intellectual property ownership taking shape with the quickly developing array of online courses and classroom capture technology. As knowledge and what Cattier termed “micro-lessons,” salient points or material conveyed in class, become increasingly available and distributable through online technologies at Emory and elsewhere, “faculty are shopping content that not only they create but maybe others have created that illustrate a point or an idea better than they’ve ever been able to illustrate in their content,” Cattier said. “There’s a marketplace emerging.” He outlined three major questions: “Who owns the rights to an online course? Who owns the rights to a class recording? Who owns the rights to a learning object? There isn’t a large body of evidence or discussion around these questions yet because we are all on this incredibly quick treadmill of change in the educational environment.” Faculty representatives from the Instructional Subcommittee for IT Governance will be looking at these questions of intellectual property and digital objects and reporting back to the Council.