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> If I was the boss at a university I would make all teaching staff put all of the content needed to teach their course material online in some wiki of sorts, w

by ronaldx 13y ago

> If I was the boss at a university I would make all teaching staff put all of the content needed to teach their course material online in some wiki of sorts, with credits for researchers and undergraduates if they can add to that body of knowledge. You should understand that you're probably asking for a significant change in contract conditions which gives you Intellectual Property rights over your employee's work. By saying "in some wiki of sorts", you mean that the university would gain the right of distribution in the way that they (commercially) see fit, rather than the author being able to use their own work. Requiring that the work is uploaded in a particular format will also cause untold headaches. My employer insisted that I sign a contract like this (giving up my IP), I refused because it would have caused problems with my other work (I literally could not consider it), and I ended up quitting over this. Textbook authors are generally not scammers. They are people trying to make a living from their expertise - expertise both in their subject and in their ability to communicate, which are skills otherwise undervalued by society. Your beef is with the publishers, not with the content creators who you are punishing here.

rahimnathwani 13y ago
In many other lines of work, employee contracts _do_ give the employer IP rights over employees' work. If I write software as part of my work, for which my employer pays me, they get to decide how to treat the IP. Many employment contracts go further, and include IP created outside work but during the term of employment. Some jurisdictions make this more strong transfer invalid/unenforceable. Why does the current system exist as you suggest? I mean, why do teaching employment contracts allow employees to retain IP they create in the course of their employment?
- ronaldx 13y ago
  You might find it more instructive to ask this question the other way around: Why do tech employees sign contracts that reach beyond the boundaries of legislated human rights? Is there any better indicator of employee exploitation? On reflection, I think the answer to your version of the question is that experienced teachers are expected to bring their teaching resources with them to new employment. Other people's resources are generally just not as useful. Having an employer hold exclusive right to the IP would be counter-productive to industry best practice on this point. But, things are indeed changing in the direction that the grandparent commenter indicates.
  - rahimnathwani 13y ago
    "Other people's resources are generally just not as useful." I wonder whether this is true. I believe that someone else's teaching resources might be harder (i.e. less useful) for a _teacher_. However, I find it hard to believe that teaching resources (like lecture notes or lesson plans) don't vary in quality and that, therefore, the teachers with the worst materials are doing their students a disservice by using the materials which are easiest for them by virtue of being familiar, although better (for the student) alternatives exist. Just use the best ones. There are no unique snowflakes. (BTW I take your point about reversing the question. It's a little tricky to find the 'right' answer for software companies because code within a company is more tightly coupled than teaching resources for different courses are in a school.)
- _delirium 13y ago
  A bit tied up with the IP issue (and maybe a bigger one) is how time accounting works: anything you are required to do as part of teaching your courses, such as actually teaching them and preparing materials for them, must generally be budgeted as "teaching time". This must usually be paid by the institution's own budget (not by grants), and the % teaching time is also a headline figure people use to compare job offers. Things not part of the official teaching duties generally fall into either "research time" (perform experiments, write papers & books, present results) or "service" (serve on committees, review papers, etc.). Currently writing textbooks is classified as "research", considered entirely the professor's own initiative, and therefore done either as part of a regular year's research time, or during a sabbatical (which is a period of 100% research time). If you reclassified textbook writing to be part of "teaching", i.e. your official teaching duties when assigned to teach a course involve not only teaching the course but also writing a textbook for it, you'd need to budget sufficient time to write the book into the teaching budget. This would typically require either reducing the number of courses the professor teaches per semester, or increasing the % of their time which is budgeted as teaching. Institutions are generally reluctant to do either of those, for a mixture of budgetary reasons (teaching is usually paid internally) and recruiting reasons (if you have an 80% teaching load at your university, you will have trouble recruiting researchers who have offers from 50%-teaching-load institutions, or from corporate research labs).
  - rahimnathwani 13y ago
    'preparing materials for them, must generally be budgeted as "teaching time". This must usually be paid by the institution's own budget (not by grants)' So, do teaching materials prepared during 'teaching time' become the IP of the employer?
Theodores 13y ago
I remember teaching staff being too busy to see students because they were working on books. I also remember buying their books, paying real money and having the burden to lug around. I would have preferred proper course notes from them, ones that I could have submitted change requests to where I found explanations lacking. I don't see that I am asking for something utopian, just collaboration instead of a poor business model. In my day job I don't think I would last long if I wrote code on the company time and then charged a backhander for the instructions/user manual. Yes I could claim it was my IP but it wouldn't wash, would it? As for textbook authors, there will always be a market for 'study guides' and such like that can give a student an advantage over their peers. These should compete on merit, i.e. being better than what that 'lousy lecturer wrote', but their purchase should not be a pre-requisite.
- ivan_ah 13y ago
  What if study-guide-sized (and priced) texts could serve as course textbooks? That's how textbooks used to be.

by ronaldx 13y ago

rahimnathwani 13y ago

In many other lines of work, employee contracts _do_ give the employer IP rights over employees' work. If I write software as part of my work, for which my employer pays me, they get to decide how to treat the IP. Many employment contracts go further, and include IP created outside work but during the term of employment. Some jurisdictions make this more strong transfer invalid/unenforceable. Why does the current system exist as you suggest? I mean, why do teaching employment contracts allow employees to retain IP they create in the course of their employment?

ronaldx 13y ago
You might find it more instructive to ask this question the other way around: Why do tech employees sign contracts that reach beyond the boundaries of legislated human rights? Is there any better indicator of employee exploitation? On reflection, I think the answer to your version of the question is that experienced teachers are expected to bring their teaching resources with them to new employment. Other people's resources are generally just not as useful. Having an employer hold exclusive right to the IP would be counter-productive to industry best practice on this point. But, things are indeed changing in the direction that the grandparent commenter indicates.
- rahimnathwani 13y ago
  "Other people's resources are generally just not as useful." I wonder whether this is true. I believe that someone else's teaching resources might be harder (i.e. less useful) for a _teacher_. However, I find it hard to believe that teaching resources (like lecture notes or lesson plans) don't vary in quality and that, therefore, the teachers with the worst materials are doing their students a disservice by using the materials which are easiest for them by virtue of being familiar, although better (for the student) alternatives exist. Just use the best ones. There are no unique snowflakes. (BTW I take your point about reversing the question. It's a little tricky to find the 'right' answer for software companies because code within a company is more tightly coupled than teaching resources for different courses are in a school.)
_delirium 13y ago
A bit tied up with the IP issue (and maybe a bigger one) is how time accounting works: anything you are required to do as part of teaching your courses, such as actually teaching them and preparing materials for them, must generally be budgeted as "teaching time". This must usually be paid by the institution's own budget (not by grants), and the % teaching time is also a headline figure people use to compare job offers. Things not part of the official teaching duties generally fall into either "research time" (perform experiments, write papers & books, present results) or "service" (serve on committees, review papers, etc.). Currently writing textbooks is classified as "research", considered entirely the professor's own initiative, and therefore done either as part of a regular year's research time, or during a sabbatical (which is a period of 100% research time). If you reclassified textbook writing to be part of "teaching", i.e. your official teaching duties when assigned to teach a course involve not only teaching the course but also writing a textbook for it, you'd need to budget sufficient time to write the book into the teaching budget. This would typically require either reducing the number of courses the professor teaches per semester, or increasing the % of their time which is budgeted as teaching. Institutions are generally reluctant to do either of those, for a mixture of budgetary reasons (teaching is usually paid internally) and recruiting reasons (if you have an 80% teaching load at your university, you will have trouble recruiting researchers who have offers from 50%-teaching-load institutions, or from corporate research labs).
- rahimnathwani 13y ago
  'preparing materials for them, must generally be budgeted as "teaching time". This must usually be paid by the institution's own budget (not by grants)' So, do teaching materials prepared during 'teaching time' become the IP of the employer?

Theodores 13y ago

I remember teaching staff being too busy to see students because they were working on books. I also remember buying their books, paying real money and having the burden to lug around. I would have preferred proper course notes from them, ones that I could have submitted change requests to where I found explanations lacking. I don't see that I am asking for something utopian, just collaboration instead of a poor business model. In my day job I don't think I would last long if I wrote code on the company time and then charged a backhander for the instructions/user manual. Yes I could claim it was my IP but it wouldn't wash, would it? As for textbook authors, there will always be a market for 'study guides' and such like that can give a student an advantage over their peers. These should compete on merit, i.e. being better than what that 'lousy lecturer wrote', but their purchase should not be a pre-requisite.

ivan_ah 13y ago
What if study-guide-sized (and priced) texts could serve as course textbooks? That's how textbooks used to be.