Professor Sells Lectures Online

KnightMB writes "Students at NCSU have the option of purchasing the lectures of a professor online. The Professor did this as a way to help those that missed class, didn't take good notes, or from another country and have trouble understanding an English speaking Professor. The reactions on campus were mixed among the students as some saw it as a great way to keep up with things should real life interfere and others see it as something to pay for on top of the tuition cost at the university. Each one cost $2.50 for the entire lecture. Some students feel it should be free or cost less. The professor brings up a point that doing this takes extra effort and it's only fair that they should have to pay for that extra time and effort needed to put the lectures online for sale such as editing, recording equipment, etc. No one is forced to purchase the lectures, they are only an additional option that students will have. Quote Dr. Schrag "Your tuition buys you access to the lectures in the classroom. If you want to hear one again, you can buy it. I guess you could see the service as a safety net designed to help the students get the content when life gets in the way of their getting to class."

Re:Hm

[rdwald]

Already been done at Caltech...Nate Lewis Rap Remix [caltech.edu].

1992 just called. They want their story back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this news? Just a heads-up, The Teaching Company has been around for years selling lectures by top rated professors from America's best universities. They sell Audio-only or DVD video. The lectures are professional quality shot in a studio.

Their website:

http://www.teach12.com/ [teach12.com]

MIT's OpenCourseWare

[Pasquina]

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned MIT's Open Courseware program (ocw.mit.edu). The goal is to have every class available online, and many have taped lectures for free, for anyone to see, not just students. I had a horrible differential equations professor, so I watched the OCW lectures from the previous term. It sure beat walking to class in the cold.

Re:Bull

[akratic]

The professor isn't providing lecture notes for a fee. He's providing recordings of the lectures.

The U.K. educational system is apparently quite different from the system in the U.S. At the two universities I've studied at, only a few professors provide lecture outlines, and none that I know of provide full lecture notes. If you miss a lecture, it's your responsibility to get notes from another student. In the U.S., providing lecture notes is not part of a professor's job description.

Taking notes is an important skill. If you try to write down everything, you're going to get lost. You need to learn how to figure out what's important to write down and what's not.

Re:Old News

[lukas.mach]

Just two links:

http://ocw.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ [berkeley.edu]

Consider this: video recording of Introduction to algorithms class, notes, exams, assignments, ... http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-046JFall-2005/LectureNotes/i ndex.htm [mit.edu]

Free and apparentely available to everybody. Does somebody know other links to a projects that would be as good as this?

it should be free to students

[ic4x0r]

having videos of the lectures are a great idea, but I think he should try to get the university to pay for it instead of the students. non-native english speakers or students who get sick and can't attend lecture shouldn't be penalized. you only need to pay for the video equipment once, and in terms of the extra time it takes to make the videos, having the videos online will probably save him the time of answering many questions that students have later that could be answered by simply re-watching the lectures.

Pay for it?

[Apotekaren]

For example, my professor records his lectures in Organization and Management digitally. Half the
course runs online, and half is lectures. So he offers his lectures online through the same service
that we get the online tasks through. For free. I'd never pay for something I had paid for before,
or something the government paid for me(this applies in my case). Putting it online is not a hassle
worth $1 per download. Our University allows him to do it on his personal(but university) webspace,
with unlimited upload.

Copyright is Not an Absolute Right

[Landaras]

Initial Disclaimer: IANAL but I am a law student who will practice copyright / technology law

With all due respect, I disagree strongly with your comment.

You said...

and what I say in class is my intellectual property

Repeat after me: copyright is not an absolute right.

Go ahead, repeat it: copyright is not an absolute right.

There is something called Fair Use [copyright.gov]. I should know, as I rely upon it when creating my podcast, [shameless plug] Life of a Law Student [lifeofalawstudent.com]. In LoaLS I build upon my notes from the lectures I took part in at law school to create audio episodes explaining the cases and the law. I then make these episodes available, for free, to anyone who wants to listen and/or download. They are licensed as CC-Attribution and GNU FDL to enable others to build upon them freely.

Out of respect, I informed my profs and the administration what I was planning on doing before I started. Most thought it was a great idea or at least would not stand in my way. Unfortunately, I had one of my professors tell me that he only gave permission for his students to take notes for their own personal use, and so he wouldn't allow me to do LoaLS off of his class. I politely told him I wasn't seeking his permission because my Use was a Fair one and thanked him for his time.

Fair Use has four articulated prongs (although there are potentially more factors to balance).

1. First, what is the nature of the new work? Is it transformative or merely derivative; is it educational and noncommercial or commercial?
2. Second, what is the amount of the old work re-used?
3. Third, is the old work largely creative or largely fact-based?
4. Fourth, what is the impact by the new work on the market for the old work? The first and fourth prongs are given considerably more weight than the second and third prongs.

Let's consider a student setting up a tape recorder and simply recording your lectures. (We'll set aside any Honor Code violations that explicitly give you the right to ban taping; we'll only deal with your "intellectual property" right.)

1. First, if the students aren't selling the recordings and using the recordings to help themselves and others learn, prong one cuts in their favor. Also, they're transforming your ephemeral audio into more durable format, so prong one further cuts in their favor under the transformative question.
2. Secondly, although they may be taping the whole old work and prong two cuts against a finding of Fair Use, this is only one prong and a less important one at that.
3. Third, your lecture is likely primarily fact-driven, so the third prong cuts in favor of finding Fair Use.
4. Finally, you're most likely not selling your existing lectures in a recorded format. You may be selling your lectures via tuition at the University, but so long as these tapes are not serving as a substitute for the University experience and/or degree, you're not being harmed. (On the contrary, I've had many people tell me they decided to go to law school because of LoaLS, because it de-mystified what law school was. In this way I'm helping the market for my law school professors, and so your hypothetical recording students could be helping the market for your copyrighted works.)

In summary, a student would likely have a legal right to record your lectures under Fair Use because three of the four prongs (and both of the important ones) would cut in their favor. If you would like make your lectures available for sale or distribution that might change the analysis. But the key thing is to disabuse yourself of this notion that your "intellectual property" is an absolute. Fair Use is explicitly codified in the Copyright Act because it is recognized that oftentimes the incu

Re:Trouble understanding English speaking professo

[Grishnakh]

Ha ha, no. It was an electrical engineering class, and worse, it was one of the required ones. I took it the next semester with a better prof.

Conflict of interest

[Animats]

Well, first of all, this is a state school, and the professor is a Government employee. So state conflict of interest laws apply.

First, North Carolina State University permits faculty to own copyright in instructional materials: "NC State does not, however, claim ownership of faculty-created instructional materials or courseware merely because it requires faculty members to teach courses as part of their regular responsibilities."

However, the department has the option of taking title to such "Directed Works": "Directed works also include works created by faculty or staff in an institute, center, department, or other unit that, with approval of the Provost, has adopted rules providing that copyright in materials prepared by such faculty or staff in the course of their work with that unit vests in NC State and not in its creator. NC State holds copyright to Directed Works."

However, see Conflicts of Interest and Committment Affecting Faculty and Non-Faculty EPA Employees [northcarolina.edu]. "Activities requiring disclosure for administrative review ... An EPA employee requiring students to purchase the textbook or related instructional materials of the employee or members of his or her immediate family, which produces compensation for the employee or family member."

Provided that the professor made the proper disclosures and those disclosures are in his personnel file, he's probably OK. The university has the option of taking over this business from the individual faculty.

Policies vary with the school. The University of Michigan permits commercial note-taking services but prohibits faculty from selling notes. [umich.edu] (This resulted in a note-taking startup, Versity.com, which was acquired by CollegeClub.com, which dumped the note-taking business to focus on entertainment content.) Yale is at the other extreme; they let faculty control their content. That's what you'd expect; state schools have to be much more careful about conflict of interest issues.

UC Davis does this too

[Ambidisastrous]

At UC Davis, the service is called Classical Notes [daviswiki.org]. In this program, the professor does nothing at all, and may even be completely phobic of computers. Students apply for positions as note-takers, attend the lectures in question, and sell the transcribed notes for a reasonable price through Classical Notes, a division of the student government.

Given this background, and the fact that a $1 fee on the professor's part is by no means extortion, the article looks like a non-story to me. University professors have a lot of freedom in how they conduct their classes, and little services on the side like this are absolutely nothing to have a fit about.

Re:Even Apple would have been better

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Germany it works like this: Each professor has some (1-n) assistants, who have an academic grade, and he also employs some students, to do the less qualified work, that does not fit into the employment scheme of a secretary (such as coding, sysadmin tasks etc.). The important part is that those assistants and student are not payed by the prof, but either by the state or the university. So, if a prof offers some additional written notes, or some taped lecture, who does the work? It's the studends working at the respective chair, being paid by the university. So the work _is_ already funded by an organization that gets its money from the state, as well as the students. There is no extra work and no extra costs for the prof. If he would sell those additional notes or taped lectures, he would be paid twice.
BTW: $2.50 for each lecture is seriously making profit, $10 for all the lectures is offering an extra service.