Re: Online Syllabi

["Siegfried Angerer" <sseaprod@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings

Reply to the Original Message by David Murray: Topics 203-205
>
Some faculty are resisting the Dean's call to submit syllabi for posting to
a central web site.  Some claim intellectual property rights for their
syllabi.  Is there any grounding in the law for this claim?
 >
Thanks to Fiona Phillips for making the list aware of the Australian
Attorney General's site.
 >
Begin---------------
As an online developer and curriculum consultant, I am by definition no
lawyer. However, it appears to me David Murray's question is not so much a
legal question and more a question of how copyright laws are circumvented
under state and federal employment laws and practices in Australia. The
claims by academic and teaching staff about their intellectual property
rights therefore, is a reference to current employment practices that allow
employers the right to deny intellectual property rights for any materials
published on web sites owned and controlled by the institution.

Firstly, there is a significant difference between a brief course
description published in a Faculty Handbook and the writing of a
comprehensive syllabus for a subject taught at University, College or
school. In Australia, School and College curriculum revisions are generally
state funded and comprise a sector wide framework review. These framework
review processes are often exclusively paper based, involve a variety of
government, private and public sector interest and appointed
representatives. The state education departments and commonwealth government
bodies such as ANTA/ DETE fund the resultant framework documents. The
purposes of  these detailed syllabi (also called frameworks) is to define
uniform teaching and learning standards across many institutions operating
in different states and territories. The copyright of these documents is
owned by the respective state or federal curriculum review body and not by
the individual contributors/ consultants.

As a past contributor to some of these framework documents, I express
reservations about the various processes involved. Expert contributors are
frequently excluded from the final editorial process as well as the quality
assurances processes; often resulting in documents that bear little
resemblance to the original. Curriculum reviews are controlled by a small
set of interest groups who often collaborate under a thin veil of
respectability and autonomy when in fact the various board members are
either appointed by, or actually represent, established institutional
interest groups. Frequently the entire review process is in reality nothing
more than a back door institutional funding option. In the case of several
Victorian based organizations we are witnessing two very blatant ways of
appropriating taxpayer funding;
a.)
The gaining of taxpayer monies under the guise of online development /
multimedia guidelines to repeat the same paper based framework review
process on a two / three yearly cyclical basis. Under this process the
review panel (often members of a public institution ) recommends the course
to reviewed and proceeds to select one of the panel members to project
manage the allocated funds.
b.)
The allocation of tax payer funds to specific curriculum organizations
operating under the guise of a private company and specifically undertaking
online / flexible development projects to fulfil a political agenda defined
by state or federal education authorities. These projects often have little
to do with quality syllabi, are often driven by educational priorities that
have little to do with quality teaching and learning, and often represent an
attempt to set quality assurance restrictions to justify state or national
funding shortages.

Academics, teachers and curriculum / subject specialist are often called in
as sub-contractors and are required to sign short term employment contracts
that specifically sign over their copyright in perpetuity and without
restrictions.
In the case of teachers and academics working on projects in house, the vast
majority of educational management make it abundantly clear that as
employees the copyright of any materials they publish for online / flexible
delivery purposes during their employment is owned by the institution. In
some cases tenured staff have in recent years been asked to sign a new
employment contract that includes clauses to specifically assign copyright
of any online / flexible learning requirements to the faculty / department/
institution.

In other cases, (and I can personally attest to this) curriculum specialist
and online developers will be asked to sign 50 page + contracts that specify
that any changes made by the host institution to the contents delivered,
automatically qualify the host institution to own all contents and
subsequently negate all licensing and royalty agreement under the contract.
(Even if the change is only one word)

These practices are only some of what I have encountered during the last ten
years. There are many other examples that would probably put me into legal
hot water if I cared to divulge the confidential settlements, or begin to
discuss some of the privileged matters a consultant is often asked to deal
with.

Secondly, it is important to mention that every College and University
already publishes its course descriptions in a faculty Handbook. I can
therefore only assume that David Murray is alluring to a request that
requires a very detailed syllabus document. As indicated in a previous post
to the list, these types of online documents are called active framework
documents and they take about 3500 hours to produce for a standard one year
University, or two year College certificate / diploma course. Since these
documents are very extensive and often contain information that link courses
across disciplines; may involve academics in other institutions / countries;
they are both a discipline wide quality assurance framework and enormously
valuable. They are so valuable because the copyright owner can sub-license
the entire program to another institution. So why would it therefore be
unreasonable for an academic to refuse a DEAN's request. I don't wonder
about it, do you?

Siegfried E. Angerer
sseaprod@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
siegfried.angerer@xxxxxxxxxxx
sseaprod01@xxxxxxxxxxx

Bu. Ph 613 9645538
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