The Rights Question - Who owns intellectual property in the brave new world of MOOCs?

By Kristen Domonell. Disputes over intellectual property (IP) rights have been around as long as faculty members have been producing ideas. Whether it’s a cure for a disease, a textbook, or even a syllabus, ownership and IP rights are dictated by a policy at every college and university in the United States. The consensus at most institutions is that either faculty members own their ideas and license an institution to use them, or, in some cases, an institution owns anything produced with its campus resources and licenses it to faculty. But when distance education took off in the 1990s, faculty and administrators started to think a little more about who owned course work. There was the potential for exposure and profit, but for the most part, the audience was still confined to an institution’s own students. Flash forward to 2013 with massive open online courses, or MOOCs, just a year old, and higher education has a new IP debate on its hands.
“MOOCs are making it different for the first time,” says Sean Brown, vice president of education at Sonic Foundry, a lecture-capture company. “There is a sense, for lack of a better phrase, of a direct market now.” In the past, debate over who owned a syllabus or even an online course was much more limited in scope because there wasn’t a real market for it. Read more...