nodalpoint.org - BioScienceCourses.org - a resource for bioscience teachers and students - Comments

Murky ownership

chris — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 05:44:46 -0500

At a certain antipodean university, complete lecture notes for some schools/faculties are available for purchase at the campus bookstore. The price tag suggests that more than the paper and spiral binding is being paid for, so I'm sure that this will also be a problem if transferring online. (That having been said, the same university operates a free, reg-only online student portal with a lot of available material. However, the material is not, I believe, available year-round due to storage restrictions).

MIT, on the other hand, has launched Open Course Ware where staff post their teaching materials. Although no credits or staff access is given, it's a very good resource both for students and for new academics designing courses for the first time.

re ownership

e2holmes — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 18:19:32 -0500

MIT has a big open-course project, and they have lots of good courses online some with downloadable lectures http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/

Rice University also has an open course program that anyone can upload courses to: http://cnx.rice.edu/

E E Holmes

thank you!

helgew — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:32:24 -0500

and kudos for nodalpoint!!

good points

helgew — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:30:43 -0500

I have had my own courses online for years and have not had any problems so far. Maybe I just slipped past under the radar, but my old site is actually linked to from my official online course.

Allowing students to post materials is possibly the most problematic issue here. I have had one case, where I was actually asked by a University, whether they could use one of my student's images. When I scrutinized the student's page, I discovered that it was plagiarized (including caption and without propper attribution to the original source) and I opted to remove it from the site.

Students generally are very happy to have everything accessible online and my own site receives some decent traffic from non-students... not enough to really make the hokey google-ad links and amazon shop items all that profitable, but hey at least it pays for some of the upgrade cost for the DSL line I have. For now, I am planning to keep biosciencecourses.org free of ads, but that's just an aside.

thanks for the feedback!!

Ownership

Neil — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 22:37:03 -0500

I expect different institutions have different policies regarding who "owns" teaching material. One possible problem is that most teaching material contains material that may itself be copyright or otherwise protected (scanned images, excerpts from papers and so on). I suppose some institutes might also be nervous that online material exposes the quality of their teaching to scrutiny - a good idea if you ask me.

Legalese nonsense aside, I think this is a good idea. Online teaching material is useful not just to students of that course, but students looking for alternative viewpoints and even non-specialists who just want more in-depth information than that provided by mainstream media. Hope the site succeeds.

I made some minor edits to

Greg — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 21:36:01 -0500

I made some minor edits to this post, adding the link to biosciencecourses.org etc.

Any thoughts on copyright issues with people putting lectures online ? Lecture podcasts are also a cool idea that might be worth checking out.

BioScienceCourses.org - a resource for bioscience teachers and students

helgew — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 15:40:22 -0500

Are you teaching in the bioscience field? Did you ever want to put your lecture online but did not know how? Did you ever want to let your students put together projects online but did not have the means to do so? Are you looking for a site to start your own, bioscience related blog? BioScienceCourses.org may just be the site for you.

As you will see, the site right now is nearly empty. That's what community driven sites are when there is no community yet! So join on in, contribute content and ideas and become part of BioScienceCourses.org