If you follow me on twitter you must have seen my tweets from the edX global forum in Washington DC from 8th Nov till the 10th. As an early adopter of MOOC, we have been extremely happy with our decision to get into MOOCs as well as with the success of our MOOCs. Measure of success is clearly in the eyes of the beholder. Those who are non-believers will point to the very poor completion rates (compared to the initial registration). Those of us who believe that MOOCs have a place in Higher Education will point to a whole list of other things – those who complete our MOOCs are still several multiples of face to face class size, our faculty are engaging with the global audience to help them learn the “liberal arts” way, they are learning from teaching in a new platform to a global audience for the benefit of the students in face to face classes, our students say that the MOOCs help them as a valuable additional resource to their face to face class etc. We are not going to settle this debate any time soon, so let us move on.
I thoroughly enjoyed the meeting. The presentations and panels were impressive. The networking was excellent. I got to meet a lot of people from Europe, some from Jordan, a few from Japan. I was fascinated to meet a young man from Sri Lanka who supports MOOCs from Kyoto University. Of course, he does not speak Japanese and I found out that he is a vegetarian. Talk about an outlier! It is also fair to say that he would be one of the rare Sinhalese Vegetarian.
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I will be writing several short ones from here on because of time crunch.
So, why should MOOCs be governed differently than a face to face class when it comes to copyrighted material? For that matter, many institutions engaged in blended learning and online courses. I assume that fair use and teach act are used to govern the use of copyrighted materials in blended and online courses. So, whats different about MOOCs? In fact, in this article about the teach act and distance education, the following is mentioned:
Under TEACH:
- Instructors may use a wider range of works in distance learning environments.
- Students may participate in distance learning sessions from virtually any location.
- All participants enjoy greater latitude when it comes to storing, copying and digitizing materials.
What’s so different about the MOOCs that we can’t apply the same rules of the game? Except for some lawyer speak and risk aversion, which is very legitimate, I have not been able to get a sound argument as to what the differences are. Some question whether those enrolled in MOOCs are really “students” or should they be called “learners”. Does it matter? Whether it is face to face class, blended or fully online, there are one or more teachers using copyrighted materials from various sources to teach to the students. Rapid advances in technologies has resulted in copyrighted material being distributed digitally than the old way – copies of paper distributed to a specific group of students. Much harder to duplicate and redistribute, which is not the case with electronic content. However, why would the use of a powerpoint presentation with copyrighted material used by a faculty in a face to face class can be used for a blended class or fully online class but not in a MOOC? Is it the scale? If so, where does fair use or teach act mention that? Whereas a small liberal arts college may have 15 students in a class, large classes in big universities can have 300-500 students or even more. In case of MOOCs it is significantly higher, but if you take the scale aside, whats the problem?
In face to face or online classes students actually pay the institution and apparently they can get free access to copyrighted material in compliance with fair use and the teach act. Whereas in MOOCs, they don’t pay, it is free, but they cannot get access freely to the same materials. What gives?