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It seems to me that there's actually a schism at the heart of copyright in HE lecture content. It goes like this:
1. The point of lectures is to communicate information to a large group of people
2. The thing that lecturers want least is to communicate information to a large group of people
The difference between the two is what constitutes the 'group' - in 1, it's students, in 2, it's everybody. The only truly efficient (current) mechanism for identifying students is 'people who are physically in the room when I talk', which is basically not good enough because it doesn't accommodate the bits of the lecture that aren't talking - handouts, slides, reading lists.
When it comes to the handouts/slides/reading lists, there's no group identification mechanism, so the lecturer relies on making accessing the content really, really annoying. Physically picking up printed copies of notes at the door of the lecture theatre, for example.
Making access annoying is exactly the opposite of making access accessible.
This is not a surface level problem - it's in the roots. I'm not at all sure what can be done to fix it, but if it does get fixed, it will have to be in the roots too.
I wrote this about accessibility, but following a quiet mull, I don't think this is an accessibility problem - or rather, I don't think it's *only* an accessibility problem. The VLE was supposed to sort the access-for-students-only problem out, but it hasn't - VLEs are still barely useable environments that most lecturers don't like or - worse - understand.
That's not good. That's bad.
Very, very tentatively, could I maybe suggest that maybe, just maybe, HE should just loosen up a little about IP?
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I'm not even sure why this wouldn't happen.
ReplyDeleteLet's be achingly cynical and business-y about it all for a second:
Teaching institutions might want to protect whatever IP is associated with teaching because (more or less) they sell teaching. So free, publicly available transcripts/recordings of lectures and associated materials might look like they undermine the revenue model of charging students to learn stuff.
But that's not where the actual value proposition is.
The value is in interacting with your teachers, and other students. It's in discussion and debate, and feedback. It's in face-to-face time discussing cool things with smart people, and it's in practical gubbins like lab time and research projects.
If you were really motivated, and kinda lucky, maybe you could get an equivalent education to a degree, just by using publicly available materials. That would be awesome.
But it would be sufficiently tricky that most people would probably still prefer to pay for structured teaching, and get all the extra stuff, plus a shiny certificate at the end.
At the very most cynical, university education is about parents paying for someone to rubber-stamp their kids as worth employing in jobs that will let them do the same to their own spawn. And more open IP wouldn't touch that at all.
Oh, and it would be enormously enriching to the public, as well as really quite interesting.
It's just IP, we did a survey here and a lot of it is people worried about the quality of their handouts and lecturing.
ReplyDeleteEspecially as people will need to pay more soon.
The thing that always annoys me about people who worry about "people stealing my IP" is how often they fail to distinguish between ideas or facts (which are not protected) and the expression of those ideas (which is protected). A lot of the arguments against recording lectures (for example) are along the lines, "I don't want people stealing my ideas". But, as you said, the point of lectures is precisely to promulgate ideas!
ReplyDeleteRoger/annothate you just went right on ahead and nailed the issue right there. Kudos.
ReplyDeleteWhere is the value proposition? That is the only question worth asking in this issue.
Tim - where did you do that survey? And are the results publicly available?
John - good distinction (and, tbh, not one I had heard articulated before). Thanks!