Who "owns" teacher created materials?

Question of the week:

I have a teacher that has created a creative commons curriculum.  It's on a Google Site.  It is amazing.  My problem  is that he has created it on his professional site - which is a a public Google site and and he has purchased a domain name for it.  While he has clearly licensed it under Creative Commons, I have concerns about what would happen if he leaves, if he got hit by a bus, etc.   Do you have any thoughts to this or a policy?  We dont care that he has developed CC curriculum. I am more concerned about the physical space it resides on - and lack of district control.  Should I be?

The question I would ask in the situation above is if the teacher developed this material on his own time or as a district employee. If he did this as a district employee, as a requirement of his job, using school resources,  then I would argue the school "owns" the course and it should be moved or copied to a school controlled host. If it something he created outside of school - for a college class, for publication, whatever - and was not something required by the district, my thought is that he owns it and we are all lucky he put the material under CC. But as it stands, I have no official policy to back me up.

 

Public schools, including ours, haven't done enough to define intellectual property rights of teacher, and perhaps student, created materials. Universities have done a better job, and we can look to them as models - perhaps. As classes begin to increasingly use CMS with (or rather than) textbooks and other commercial products, questions like the one above will become more prevalent - and important.

 

Our local university is a part of MNSCU (the Minnesota State Colleges and University system) and their 3.26 Intellectual Property board policy gives some guidance. At the heart, it recognizes four types of IP:

1. Institutional Works: "Institutional works are works made for hire in the course and scope of employment by employees or by any person with the use of college or university resources, unless the resources were available to the public without charge or the creator had paid the requisite fee to utilize the resources. A course outline is an institutional work." These belong to the institution.
2. Scholarly Works: "Scholarly works are creations that reflect research, creativity, and/or academic effort. Scholarly works include course syllabi, instructional materials (such as textbooks and course materials), distance learning works, journal articles, research bulletins, lectures, monographs, plays, poems, literary works, works of art (whether pictorial, graphic, sculptural, or other artistic creation), computer software/programs, electronic works, sound recordings, musical compositions, and similar creations." These belong to the individual who created them.
3. Personal Works: "A personal work is a work created by an employee or student outside his or her scope of employment and without the use of college or university resources other than resources that are available to the public or resources for which the creator has paid the requisite fee to utilize." These belong to the individual who created them.
4. Student Works: "a) Intellectual property rights in student works belong to the student who created the work. b) A creative work by a student to meet course requirements using college or university resources for which the student has paid tuition and fees to access courses/programs or using resources available to the public, is the property of the student. c) A work created by a student employee during the course and scope of employment is an institutional work and intellectual property rights to such creation belong to the college or university unless an agreement, sponsorship agreement, or other condition described in Subpart B or C below provides otherwise." So the ownership of student works depends on whether it is done as a student or as a student employee.

Were the teacher who created the CC course a member of MNSCU, my reading of this policy gives him, not the school, ownership of the course since it fits the Scholarly Works category. 

Yet one of the few schools in Minnesota that I am aware of having having a board policy on who owns IP is quite different. Its policy states:

Unless the employee develops, creates or assists in developing or creating a publication, instructional material, computer program, invention or creation entirely on the employee’s own time and without the use of any school district facilities or equipment; the employee shall immediately disclose and, on demand of the school district, assign to the school district any rights to publications, instructional materials, computer programs, materials posted on websites, inventions or creations that the employee develops or creates or assists in developing or creating during the term of the employee’s employment and for 12 months after employment with ______ Public Schools. In addition, employees must sign necessary documents and perform necessary acts to secure the school district’s rights relating to such publications, instructional materials, computer programs, materials posted on websites, inventions or creations, including domestic and foreign patents and copyrights. 

So in order to answer the question above, we would need more information according to this school's policy - when and where was the material created, not specifically for what purpose. My sense is that determining "on whose time" a product is created may become increasingly difficult as work life and personal life seem to be more and more blended and there is the expectation that teachers do a lot work outside the "contract day."

K-12 schools probably need more rights to teacher created materials since their curricula are more standardized continuous than that of a university's. What a teacher creates for a class that supports state standards can be used by many teachers over an extended period of time. In my experience teaching post-secondary classes, every instructor basically starts from scratch following only general content guidelines so access and use by contemporary and future instructors is not as important.

Another way to address this issue is by taking the approach that the MN Partnership for Collaborative Curriculum & Innovative Instruction has taken and set clear property rules up front for a specific project. Teachers work on the course for a set payment, knowing they have access via CC, but not ownership.  

As more of our teachers develop online content, this question will come up more often. When writing our policy, I'd like to look at a few more policies, example the feasibility of co-ownership of copyrightable materials, and consult our teachers' organization.

 

Anybody with a brilliant policy they'd be willing to share?

Here's another POV worth considering...

We do not have an IP policy, though the question has been posed.  IMHO, the likelihood of needing to enforce IP rights by a district are very small while the risk of perturbation of staff by stating that we own IP rights to 99% of classroom material is high.  In addition, if we get ourselves in a situation of enforcing rights, having a policy or not having a policy is likely irrelevant.

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The Self-Evident Awards

The Ig Nobel Prizes are annual awards given by Harvard University for "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think."  One category that often appears is one I would define as "did we really need a study to prove this?" An example from the 2013 winners:

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE
REFERENCE: “‘Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder’: People Who Think They Are Drunk Also Think They Are Attractive,” Laurent Bègue, Brad J. Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, Medhi Ourabah, British Journal of Psychology, epub May 15, 2012.

Were there IgNobels for Education, what might the titles of these self-evident studies be:

• "Students do better academically when emotionally engaged"
• "Students who have stable, caring families do better in school"
• "Children who eat less junk food and get exercise have fewer health problems"
• "Classrooms that use gaming principles are ranked more positively by students"
• "Schools that de-emphasis test scores are scored higher on measures of positive climate by parents and students."
• "Students who have access to materials of personal interest read more and read better"
• "Students with access to good school libraries have access to more materials of personal interest"
• "Teachers who use technology in interactive activites are ranked higher by students"

I suspect you can easily come up with a dozen or more "Stating the Obvious" Awards from your own educational experience.

In Encouraging Educator Courage (Education Week, September 16, 2013), Alfie Kohn writes:

Education research doesn’t always get the respect it deserves, but let’s be honest: There’s already enough of it to help us decide what to do (or stop doing) on many critical issues. Likewise, there are plenty of examples of outstanding classrooms and schools in which that research is being put into practice. What’s lacking is sufficient courage for those examples to be widely followed.

It pains me to say this, but professionals in our field often seem content to work within the constraints of traditional policies and accepted assumptions—even when they don’t make sense. Conversely, too many educators seem to have lost their capacity to be outraged by outrageous things. Handed foolish and destructive mandates, they respond only by requesting guidance on how to implement them.

The Cowardly Lion was able to admit that he lacked what made the muskrat guard his musk. Cowardly humans are more likely just to change the subject. Propose something that makes a meaningful difference, and you’ll hear, “But we’ve always ...,” “But the parents will never ...,” “But we can’t be the only school in the area to ...”

What, then, do truly courageous educators do? They dig deeper, they take responsibility, and they share power.

We have plenty of evidence. All of us, myself included, just need more courage.

3 questions about educational data

Desire2Learn has announced its latest grab: Knowillage Systems, Inc. Knowillage makes LeaP, an artificial intelligence that can sit on top of a learning management system. LeaP tracks individual K-12 grade student’s performance through online assignments and quizzes, and grows smarter with everything it sees. It then tailors the student’s lessons to them, offering different types of readings or practice problems if the student is struggling.

Basically, it’s a robot teacher, albeit one that operates through a computer. ...

It’s a little sad that our educational system is so strapped that we need machines to give students individualized care.

But wishing we had more teachers doesn’t make it so... Carmel Deamicis, "When Your Teacher is a Robot", Pandodaily, September 9, 2013.  

Cappo, Marge, Fred D'Ignazion et al. Technology, trends, and gizmos: a timeline for the '90s... and beyond. Technology & Learning. 11.1 (Sept. 1990): p92.*

When I read about how we use educational data in schools, some questions come to mind: 

1. Is the technology a decision-making tool or a diagnostic tool? Who is the better diagnostician: the doctor or the database? Who can create a better IEP: a teacher or a database? Or is the best diagnostician the doctor or the teacher who skillfully uses a database?
2. Why haven't we been able to apply the concept of mass customization to education? Traditionally, one had the choice of buying blue jeans either off the rack (mass produced and cheap) or tailor-made by hand (customized and expensive). But as I remember, one savvy manufacturer combined the two by having individuals send in their specific measurements which were then input into a program that directed a robot to make a unique pair of jeans with exactly those measurements. As the opening quote suggests, artificial intelligence programs that work with data mining and CMS systems might make this a reality. (The love child of Moodle and Viewpoint in our district.) 
3. If want to use data to help individualize students, what is the most valuable information to record, organize and analyze? I see data-mining being done primarily to evaluate schools, teachers, and groups of students - not individual students. Given that our data repository primarily holds state testing and NWEA MAPS data from tests given one or twice a year, there is insufficient granularity to use the analytics to design programs for individual students. (We can say that a building's 4th graders are not doing well in math, but does that help the specific individual who is struggling?) Do we need to stop investing in and fussing about state/national norm-reference test scores, and instead figure out how to record performance data on individual skills as measured by formative assessment tied to local learning outcomes?** Seems more useful for day-to-day guidance.

I do think technology will play a role in helping individualize instruction. But at the same time, I do not want to lose the human element in education. I want a caring teacher, wisely using data, to make the final call on how my grandchildren are performing, what they need to work on, and the resources and activities needed to get them there. I want their educations to not just be individualized, but personalized, and I don't think a robot teacher will ever be able to do that.

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*This is an article well-worth finding. (I had a copy inter-library loaned to me since I could not find the graphic version online - the graphics contain the bulk of the information, and they're lost in the text version available from full-text databases.

** I took an educational jargon-enhancement pill this morning.