acultights

  Intellectual Property Agreements at Institutions of Higher Learning

The intellectual property agreements of our institutions affect all faculty. It is often interesting to compare agreements.

For faculty, the main issues are whether the college can use the materials faculty create and give them to another instructor who will teach the course and whether faculty can take those materials and develop the same or similar courses for other institutions. This gets complicated if the faculty has been paid to develop the course materials. In this case a contract should clearly spell out rights.

My concern is that in the future faculty may NOT be asked to design new courses, and that function will be delegated to the Information Technologists only. I think that there should be collaboration between the teacher, the IT professionals and the librarians, but faculty should develop and teach the courses.