arstechnica.com— A North Carolina professor who offered his course lectures as paid downloads has been asked to suspend the service while the school decides whether it is appropriate.
Sep 18, 2006View in Crawl 4
This is an inaccurate title. The school is not trying to silence the podcasts, the school doesn't think it's appropriate that the students have to pay for the podcasts and they also think it is inappropriate that the prof is keeping the money. The students have already paid for the lectures, now they have to pay for them again.
I can see why you think that. When reading the article that never occured to me even. It says it was for the general public as well, and he was forced to stop doing that as well. So that's why I submitted it. But I see where you are coming from.
At the same time he's taking extra trouble to record the audio, edit, encode, and upload. That's something he didn't have to do. Hell, there are too many professors that would be more than happy to tell the student "too damn bad" if they missed a class.
Agreed. The submitter clearly has no reading comprehension. This is obviously something the legal department of the school needs to look at. Is there a precendent for something like this? Are professors allowed to sell written transcripts of lectures? Who actually "owns" the lectures? I don't see what cost there could be for this. I believe many professors have been doing this free-of-charge for years suing school hosting. This professor is actually performing business transactions here. The school certainly needs to determine their own liabilty in this.
ifelixSep 18, 2006
This is an inaccurate title. The school is not trying to silence the podcasts, the school doesn't think it's appropriate that the students have to pay for the podcasts and they also think it is inappropriate that the prof is keeping the money. The students have already paid for the lectures, now they have to pay for them again.
Closed AccountSep 19, 2006Submitter
I can see why you think that. When reading the article that never occured to me even. It says it was for the general public as well, and he was forced to stop doing that as well. So that's why I submitted it. But I see where you are coming from.
mc4_aSep 19, 2006
At the same time he's taking extra trouble to record the audio, edit, encode, and upload. That's something he didn't have to do. Hell, there are too many professors that would be more than happy to tell the student "too damn bad" if they missed a class.
wozleySep 19, 2006
Exactly. That's why I don't buy mine.
moracitySep 19, 2006
Agreed. The submitter clearly has no reading comprehension. This is obviously something the legal department of the school needs to look at. Is there a precendent for something like this? Are professors allowed to sell written transcripts of lectures? Who actually "owns" the lectures? I don't see what cost there could be for this. I believe many professors have been doing this free-of-charge for years suing school hosting. This professor is actually performing business transactions here. The school certainly needs to determine their own liabilty in this.
cogitocogitoSep 19, 2006
He should just do the typical thing and assign the mandatory $150 textbook authored by himself.
fnaqznaSep 19, 2006
Well... if it wasn't "above and beyond" the school would already have servers in place and also provided all the necessary tools to the instructor.