Intellectual Property

Properly managed copyright ownership and licensing rights are essential tools to stimulate, reward and recognize faculty to develop innovative educational activities. If such rights are not properly managed, they could become a major obstacle.

Challenge 1. Intellectual property created at a university can be extremely valuable. Therefore, sometimes teachers and students are not willing to share that data. For many faculty, this is unacceptable because it is completely opposite to traditions of education as a public service. Therefore, we will probably face this challenge only sporadically.

Challenge 2. Traditionally, faculty and administrators both resist creating project-specific written agreements. Without a written agreement, the copyright law states that all contributing authors are "joint owners" or "owners in common." (Donohue, Howe-Steiger, 2007). Such a situation can cause painful tensions, enormous litigation expenses and, in the end, can permanently discourage future courseware development.

Challenge 3. Choosing an appropriate copyright model. There are three basic copyright models (Donohue, Howe-Steiger, 2007):
 * Faculty-owns-the-copyright model
 * University-owns-the-copyright or work-for-hire model
 * Collaborative ownership model

Traditionally used are the first two modes: Faculty-owns-the-copyright and university-owns-the-copyright. From the administrator’s perspective, they are simple, easy-to-use models that have long tradition. New. The model of choice now would seem to be the collaborative ownership format even though it requires the "soft" analysis of relative contributions  and takes the most time to develop (negotiation of incentives, rights, and other expectations). Donohue and Howe-Steiger found that sharing rights keeps the cost of curriculum development down, allows each party to do everything with the courseware that they might want to do, and attracts excellent academic and private-sector experts to e-learning projects (Donohue, Howe-Steiger, 2007).

Collaborative ownership model addresses unique e-learning issues such as collaboration between groups from different institutions, different experts (content expert, instructional designer, web developer . . . ), content updating and maintenance, financial incentives and royalties from distribution of e-learning courses.