Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Who owns student work? Does this change just because work's in an LMS or a PLE?

Reading Terry Anderson's discussion of the diff between an LMS and a PLE. He says this: "The old saying that possession is 9/10 of ownership doesn’t really mean much in the electronic era, but there is a sense that contributions on an institutional site are owned (or at least access is controlled to them) by the institution." (http://terrya.edublogs.org/2006/01/09/ples-versus-lms-are-ples-ready-for-prime-time/) I'm not convinced that holds true. I've reviewed a lot of university intellectual property policies and I can't think of a single one that doesn't cede copyright to the student. (There might be a provision to use student work for evaluation purposes - or in the case of dissertations/theses, some policy to allow the school to continue to make the student's work available. Students doing work for hire - that's a different case.) Are policies in Canada much different from that? It seems to me that it's easy enough to keep copies of the work submitted to an LMS. Of course if a student wants to make it available to the world, they'll probably have to find another place to put it up online.

1 comment:

Cris said...

No, I don't think the copyright ownership changes at all. My university has a consent and waiver that students sign electronically the first day of classes that doesn't address copyright at all but by signing they simply acknowledge that they agree to share their work with the public via the Web 2.0 tools we use. It's made the biggest difference in my class being able to contribute their creative work with other educators.

Hey, you're a Second Lifer. Hope to meet you at the meetings. Oh, I may have already ;-) I'm 2B Writer.