Who owns our material?

 I learned yesterday that the university administration has somehow blocked UM Learn (the learning management system, or LMS) access to materials pertaining to many UMFA-led courses.  As of this morning, for some reason, I still have access and I presume my students do as well, but that could change at the press of a few buttons. Apparently.

This highlights one of the many non-salary issues that are on the table during this bargaining: Who owns course content?

For years, we were encouraged to develop courses and content that could be delivered remotely, through Distance (continuing) Education.  Most of us have resisted because a) it’s a lot of work, b) it’s not our job, and c) it isn’t clear who owns that content.  In many universities, the administration tries to retain ownership of the material, meaning they can offer the course without having to pay a person to actually teach it. Imagine developing a course, something moderately popular, and then getting fired because now that the university has all your materials they don’t need you anymore. And there aren’t any residuals packages or anything to keep generating money for anyone except the university.

With the pandemic, of course, many of us were forced into developing material like that, or at least recording lectures and so on, that could be used later, by ourselves or by someone else.  One of the issues that wasn’t clear at the time, and isn’t now, is who owns those materials and what can they be used for. 

Many of my colleagues see this access issue during the strike as a signal that the university intends to own and control our content. It’s difficult to see what other benefit, to themselves, they could be trying to produce. The students are angry, we’re angry, and they’re sitting on our copyright material.

You’d think that preventing us (striking UMFA members) from accessing our course materials, like our offices and so on, would be a reasonable way to punish us for being on strike. Many of us took down our own materials ahead of the strike to avoid exactly this situation.

The only ones being punished by this are the students. One can’t see this being a great PR move on their part, especially with many of us having decided to leave what’s in the LMS up for students.

So to be clear, if your course has disappeared from the LMS, it’s because the administration has blocked your access, not your UMFA-represented instructor. (The most we can do is remove or make invisible the material.  We can’t actually block the course.)  Hopefully this is just some kind of glitch, but it’s timing is awfully suspicious.