“When the dust of confusion and misconception is cleared away, a new collaborative paradigm for creation of e-learning courseware begins to emerge. E-learning offers both instructors and students a whole range of methods and possibilities that complement effective traditional teaching and learning modes and address the well-recognized diversity in individual learning styles, tastes, and preferences.
E-learning projects, however, should not be undertaken as a get-rich-quick scheme for either the administrator or faculty member. Although there might be financial benefits, such benefits are more likely to accrue over time as partners explore possibilities, innovate to address changing needs and interests, find some efficiencies, and generally improve the effectiveness of education and learning in the academy.
As described in the legal precedents sidebar, faculty (the instructors who create and teach the courses) are the undisputed legal owners of their traditional classroom courses and lectures. The sheer technical complexity of developing most e-learning courseware, however, means that the e-learning course will most often be created by a team of experts, including content experts, instructional design experts, and technical experts. E-learning projects will also often use more than ordinary resources from the host university.
Relying on standard, preset protocols to sort out the incentives for either the university administration or the faculty to take on the work involved in creating e-learning courseware is unrealistic. Fortunately, the unique nature of copyright, which is explained in detail in Part 2, as well as the long legal history for ownership of traditional classroom courseware by the instructor/developer, create an opportunity for administrators to craft agreements that define current and future relationships among contributors to an e-learning project. To do this, however, all partners must explicitly be involved in thinking through questions of ownership, distribution of licensing rights, royalties, academic honor, and even long-term maintenance and updating of materials.”