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Comment by brosephius | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if they're thinking of going to a for-profit model where users pay to take a class and earn a certificate.

On a side note, who owns the course material a professor creates while employed at a university?

From some side conversations with MIT administration and faculty, professors are the owners of their course material and can distribute it as they please.

MITx would be encouraged, with incentives, but a professor would be free to use Udacity, Coursera, etc if they please.

This reasoning would match previous MIT-wide initiatives. OCW material was put up at professor initiative with some financial incentive. DSpace, the open source paper repository, is opt-out. If the professor wants to sell his rights to a publisher, who will typically charge others for access, that is completely their choice.

Whether this is a legal statute or if it's just that MIT would not sue a professor was not made clear to me.

MITx is planning free courses and pay to get a certificate. Udacity is planning free everything while making money by hooking top students up with recruiters. Coursera doesn't seem to have decided yet.

Can you link to the source for that info?

Regarding Udacity's business plan: In June Thrun "took the next step: cofounding KnowLabs... He pulled in David Stavens... as CEO… Thrun decides that KnowLabs will build something called Udacity… Stavens is thinking about potential business models. Though Thrun cringes at the notion of charging students, people might eventually pay for add-ons—say, TA services, study aids, or offline materials. He also considers other revenue streams. Near the end of the term, he emails his top 1,000 students, the ones with perfect or near-perfect scores on homework and tests. The subject: Job Placement Program. Thrun solicits résumés and promises to get the best ones into the right hands at tech companies, including Google. A recruiter who places a hire typically earns 10 to 30 percent of an engineer’s first-year salary, which might be $100,000. Stavens figures he could charge much less. After all, KnowLabs discovers talent in the course of doing business."[1]

[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_aiclass/

I didn't have links saved, but googling turns up, for example, this:

"While the certificates for this course will be free, students will have to pay a modest fee for credentials in future courses expected to begin this fall." http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mitx-opens-enrollment...

0ren found a good link for udacity.

I don't know if that has ever been tested in court. Most universities are accepting (or even encouraging) of professors to share materials online. However, sharing materials online and making money off course materials are 2 different things. Currently, I would say professor because he/she is free to take course materials when switching universities.

Actually there's extensive case history on this topic. In the US where I'm familiar with it, most generally, books and course materials produced by professors while employed are not considered work for hire. Research results such as patents coming from work done in university research labs are much more likely to be considered work for hire. It depends a lot on the contract the professor has agreed to though.

Pro professor citations:

http://www.aaup.org/NR/exeres/517C85B6-CC13-4A47-AE3E-5C1763...

> Generally, faculty scholarly work is not considered work-for-hire. "[I]t has been the prevailing academic practice to treat the faculty member as the copyright owner of works that are created independently and at the faculty member's own initiative for traditional academic purposes." Statement on Copyright, AAUP Policy Documents & Reports 182 (9th ed. 2001).

More generally Pro-university or ambiguous citations:

http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/copyright-ownership/...

More neutral legal analysis of concepts:

http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/owner.pdf

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