As Web-based distance learning programs proliferate at universities around the country, college administrators find themselves in conflict with faculty members and textbook publishers over the copyright ownership of materials developed for online courses. At Stevens Institute in Hoboken, N.J., an engineering school that launched WebCampus Stevens, an accredited online graduate program in telecommunications in 1998, the faculty has endorsed a comprehensive new policy on online intellectual property that is modeled after traditional textbook publishing practices. In the world of online courses, university professors are adapting their lesson plans to use online in conjunction with material from textbook sources. At the same time, college administrators, well aware of the highly profitable distance learning market, are faced with balancing the interests of faculty and textbook publishers while they market these courses to potential students or to other institutions and businesses.
Faculty members receive separate payment for teaching an online course.
The policy does not apply to materials, such as digital books, mounted on the Web as supplements to classroom instruction. Faculty members continue to own their outlines, exams and lecture notes and can use them offline in conventional courses. And, Ubell said, WebCampus aggressively markets and licenses its online courses to corporations and educational institutions. An individual faculty member can't market these courses like the schools. An ad hoc faculty committee, convened by the college, developed the policy.