I have had some interesting feedback from my colleagues about protecting their work.
Its not just a play or poems that are plagiarized. My posts have pointed out that the academia is the hotbed of plagiarism.
You teach a course and you create a curriculum that arms the student with skills that can immediately be used in the real world.You made them see the importance of using certain calculations or tools or methods.
You then teach a different course. The management does not own the curriculum you developed.
The next person who comes in to teach needs to be given an advance notice of at least 45 days to get a textbook in place and develop his own curriculum. Or you can work out a deal for a royalty. this is unheard of but you should be able to do that with any kind of training or educational institute.My point is that your work will draw many views. The chances of its being copied are higher than you think! Here is an example:
On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re the ‘Wrong’ Professor
October 2, 2014
Image: Karen McArthur.
I—November 29, 2011
At 7:30 on a Tuesday, right after supper, Karen McArthur had just started to wind down for the night. Her three kids were in their pajamas, reading in front of the fireplace, and her husband Jim was cleaning up the kitchen.
McArthur, an adjunct professor of art history at Austin Peay State University, flipped open her laptop to see if any students had questions about their class assignments. Instead, she was shocked by an email from Alexandra Blau, a colleague she’d never met.
Blau wrote to ask if McArthur had designed a full-semester online class on art appreciation that she could copy. “I had a summer one I copied from someone else (it was your class),” she said, “but I thought it may be better to start from scratch with a normal semester-length class.”
A summer one I copied (it was your class). McArthur wondered: Was Blau really teaching a course she had created? If so, why didn’t she know about it? McArthur had, in fact, spent two years developing and refining an art-appreciation curriculum, but she had never authorized other professors to use it. Was it possible that her colleagues were pretending to be her in other virtual classrooms?
For adjuncts like McArthur, those questions can be deeply troubling. Teaching is a core part of their academic identity—in many cases, it’s the only thing they’re evaluated and compensated for. Indeed, McArthur considered the creation of her courses to be an original, creative act, just like research.
But unlike scholarship, teaching isn’t always protected by a widespread consensus on intellectual-property rights. And when it comes to teaching, some scholars say that there’s a rich academic tradition in which professors frequently borrow, trade, and even steal content without attribution. As higher-learning rapidly moves from bricks and mortar to cyberspace, and the use and reuse of “shell” courses grows more common, academics have reason to wonder which parts of creating and teaching online courses count as their own—and what, if any, recourse there is for lecturers who feel their content is being used by others without permission or payment.
It’s perfectly common for professors to borrow ideas without attribution, said James M. Lang, a professor of English and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College, but the advent of online courses taught by adjunct professors has changed the equation. “We are going to have to think more carefully about what kinds of things can be borrowed from colleagues and what kinds of things should count as intellectual property,” says Lang.
II – Winter Semester, 2004
Karen McArthur first thought about those issues in 2004, a year after she began teaching at Austin Peay, a campus near the Fort Campbell military base on the border between Hopkinsville, Kentucky and Clarksville, Tennessee.
McArthur, who was being paid around $2,000 per course, was asked by her department chair, Dixie Webb, now dean of the university’s College of Arts and Letters, to develop a web-based art-appreciation “shell course”—a generic template, in other words, that every instructor teaching that course could use.
A shell course needs to be adaptable to each professor’s area of expertise. “If you’re an art historian, you lean on history when you teach. If you’re a painter, you might assign more art projects,” McArthur said. “The chair asked me to develop this course because there were no other art historians in the department.”
McArthur said that Webb offered to pay her around $2,500 to create the shell course. (Webb declined to comment and said she was instructed to direct me to media relations.) The funds never materialized, though, so the professor moved on and continued designing and teaching her course, which became the basis for a book project. “This course was my intellectual property. I signed a contract with a literary agent,” McArthur said.
In 2008, McArthur heard from a learning-management specialist at Austin Peay, requesting permission to copy her course for a professor named Bruce Childs. “Professor Childs mentioned that he had been speaking with you about working together, and he thought you wouldn’t mind if I copied your course,” the specialist wrote in an email. “But I really felt the need to check with you to see if this is okay.”
McArthur fired back an email with the subject line, “do not copy!”
“No, he cannot use my course; no one has permission to use my course,” she said in the email. “I have never and will never give permission for other professors to use my course shell. Sounds harsh but that’s that.”
After that email exchange, McArthur said she considered the matter closed, until she received Alex Blau’s email years later.
III – November 30, 2011
The day after McArthur received Blau’s email, she drove to campus to visit Danielle Dickson, a technologist who worked in the distance-education department. Dickson confirmed that Blau had copied her course from another adjunct professor, Robb Fladry, a former student of McArthur who is now an assistant professor of graphic design and department chair at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
McArthur noticed that Blau and Fladry had used her course to teach 175 students in seven sections. “All they did was delete my name and email address and fill in the blanks with their own personal information,” she said.
To McArthur, this was appalling. She felt that Blau and Fladry had passed off the personal stories that peppered her lectures as their own. There was the trip she took to the Tate Gallery in London in 1992, when she was a senior in college, which prompted her to change her mind about becoming an art historian instead of a lawyer. There was the trip to Rome where she saw Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.” (She told students in her written lecture that she had gotten a nasty virus and had to be hospitalized.)
McArthur said she included these stories because she wanted students to appreciate the difference between seeing a famous artwork in a book and experiencing it in person.
And in the screenshots that Dickson gathered for her, McArthur saw some of Blau and Fladry’s students respond positively to her personal anecdotes. A student named Kyle Davis, for example, wrote of the lecture on “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa”: “The description given in the lecture … made me really want to see it in person.” Based on the screenshots, McArthur worried that Blau and Fladry never corrected any student’s assumption that they had written the course: “They pretended to be me in order to make a few thousand extra dollars.”
Fladry and Blau dispute that account. Blau said her 2011 email to McArthur was a collegial attempt to get answers about the course she was given to teach from what she understood to be a template. The allegation that she was a knowing accomplice to plagiarism is “deeply upsetting,” she said.
“I obviously had no idea that she had not given the OK to use it.” Fladry said in an email. “I guess you can use that word plagiarize for anything these days.”
He said he notified students that McArthur developed the course content. “I made no claims that these were my experiences,” he said.
Fladry said the department chair gave him McArthur’s shell course with the understanding that it’s common practice for a “subject-matter expert” to develop the course material and projects, with another hired instructor facilitating, grading, and interacting with students.
And at Austin Peay, as at many institutions with heavy online course loads, that is a standard practice. Bill Persinger, director of public relations and marketing, said in an email that it is common for faculty who teach online courses at Austin Peay and at other universities to share content, though it is the university’s practice to ask permission from the professor who develops the course.
In McArthur’s case, that appears not to have happened. In February 2013, the university admitted wrongdoing. In a settlement agreement signed by McArthur and former Austin Peay president Tim Hall, the university acknowledged that the online course materials McArthur developed “were and are her intellectual property” and that the sections Blau and Fladry taught were wrongfully used. The university compensated her $17,200 for her troubles.
Hall said he couldn’t vividly recall all the details of the case, but “it ought not be the case that someone who has prepared a course should have their work taken over and distributed to other people.”
IV – Does the Person Matter?
This should have settled the matter. But the relationship between McArthur and Austin Peay had soured. McArthur said she found herself fighting for classes—going from teaching seven to 10 courses per academic year down to only two. After 12 years of teaching at the university, her contract was not renewed this semester. “I’ve been cut off,” McArthur said.
Persinger said that has nothing to do with the struggle over McArthur’s shell course. Courses for adjuncts have been scarcer since the university created new faculty lines—including two in the art department for 2011-12—to reduce dependence on part-time lecturers.
According to Persinger, Blau is still teaching the art appreciation course. McArthur questioned why the university would maintain a copyist to teach the class instead of her.
But in the eyes of some professors and education experts, authorship is almost beside the point. Fladry said he didn’t develop original content—or omit McArthur’s references to specific experiences—because every student taking an Austin Peay course in art appreciation should get the same content, no matter whose class they’re in.
“Using the accepted course shell prevents any discrepancy in material,” he said. “I didn’t change the details because that would change the integrity of the class.”
Susan Gautsch, director of online learning at the University of Southern California, said she wasn’t surprised to hear about how McArthur’s content and personal stories were used. “If I was a student and had the option of an adjunct professor with very little experience or stories of their own to tell versus an adjunct professor who was able to re-appropriate other people’s experiences by pushing a button or copying and pasting it,” she said, “I wouldn’t care if the stories were theirs or not.”
“Was I entertained and captivated? Did this course keep me engaged? I don’t care about the person. I care about my learning around these stories.”
Gautsch and Lang, of Assumption College, both note that shell courses—and adjuncts teaching others’ material—have become commonplace. But Lang issued strong warnings about the practice.
“That’s a potential trend in online education that we have to be wary of,” he said. “It depersonalizes everything. In the Austin Peay situation, the depersonalization process seemed to reach its nadir.”
The obvious loss, Lang said, is that shell courses don’t give instructors an incentive to create their own courses—or to actually teach. A templated course, he added, can all too frequently end up being taught by a professor without real expertise in the topic at hand.
To some students, at least, expertise still matters. Richard McLain, one of the students Fladry taught using McArthur’s shell, said he enjoyed taking the course while he was deployed in Afghanistan. Fladry was responsive to his questions, he said, unlike some other online professors who sometimes take up to a week to respond to students.
Still, McLain said he was disappointed to learn that Fladry had used another professor’s content. “I’m upset. I’d like to know the professor who developed the class. She sounds really passionate about art, and you get that from the course content.”
“I’m no special snowflake in class,” he said, “but I think that a professor who takes the time to develop and perfect a class ought to be the one giving it.”
Wow,I didn’t know this was happening! It is straight cheating! And if not considered cheating,then the whole base of ethics is being changed.And that is not acceptable.
Using work of your colleagues without their permission is stealing,and should be punishable.Thank you for sharing this story with us.Because like me,I don’t think many people know about this! Many professors out there who are being a victim of this,and have no idea.
It was a great post.I am glad I read it! 🙂
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So well put. you certainly get my drift. Professors, instructors, students: ALL are being cheated. Read my post about Niche blogs and IPR. I thank you over and over for your lovely comment. “Using work of your colleagues without their permission is stealing,and should be punishable.” Excellent! Much obliged!
🙂 🙂
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No problem:)
You are doing good for so many,if me reading is going to help the cause.Why not?
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Are u on twitter? 🙂 TY!
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nope,deleted twitter a few days ago.
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hmmm, I am sorry to hear that! Your writing will get a bigger audience, though I see you DO have fans! 🙂
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Thanks…:)
I didn’t really understand how to use it.I hope I get better at it.And my blog would be more accessible.Thank you for the encouraging words:)
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you would be the 300th person to have agreat blog, but no twitter, May be you could use FB just as well1 FB has about 1 billion members, Twitter does not. I am sure you can reach your audience that way! Any help I can provide in reaching the readers would make me happy!
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Thank you for that….!
I am really happy that you want to help.Thanks again:)
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I THANK YOU for inspiring me!! https://iblogstats.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/the-cost-of-fighting-plagiarism-the-downside-to-theft/ Please read, leave a comment, #analytics #BigData #iOS9TH 🙂
IN THIS POST I THANK YOU!
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No problem…Will do that:)
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Oh wait…I have read it…and I follow the author I think…Thank you for the reccomendation:)
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Thank you for sharing Alwynn. It is really happening and I feel for Karen Mc Arthur. She should really have to be compensated for her work and I guess it is a lesson learned. The only thing that may lessen her sadness I guess is knowing that many students have benefitted from her work. Still, they should have at least recognized it is her work. Also, her expertise could have benefitted more students if she was not fired. I hope she will still be able to share her expertise to the world especially to the students who wants to know more about art and be compensated for it.
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“I hope she will still be able to share her expertise to the world especially to the students who wants to know more about art and be compensated for it.” It is so wonderful to see that someone out there is thinking like me! Let her pain be our lesson. You write so well, and touch others. I want you to copyright it if you can!
I truly appreciate your sincere comments!
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Thank you for thinking that I write so well as I believe I really am not a writer although I want to be one. For now I really am writing just to practice it and for others to learn from it. I guess I will be glad if someone like you appreciates it. As for copyright, I think it is all right but I have not thought about it yet as I am really new at blogging and most of things I write are personal views and stories so I didn’t think about someone else copying them. I guess if they do then maybe it shows who they are and I will still thank them for thinking my writing is worth copying. 🙂
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“I really am not a writer although I want to be one. For now I really am writing just to practice it and for others to learn from it.”
What matters so much is that you are writing from the heart. anyone can follow a set of rules in grammar, understand stylistics. Writing from the heart and touching others lives is an innate talent: one cannot buy that!
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Thank you very much Alwynn. I really am happy if my writing will touch anyone’s lives as many writers touched mine. Of course, I believe writers should be compensated for their work as they deserve it but most of them I think feels compensated also if someone appreciated and benefitted from them. It is very good if they earn from it as it is really not easy to write something. Authors/writers have worked for it and I think what they produce are work of art and an art is worth to be paid for or at least the writer should be given due recognition. 🙂
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Thank you so writing such an insightful and important piece. It’s outright injustice when someone steals your work. So sorry for Karen. But in China, there is a saying: Only when you are good, you’re copied. Being copied by others is an indication that you’re good.
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TY for the comment. I absolutely agree, at least the plagiarists understand quality LOL. However, I set traps and document. Management has a responsibility to prevent the plagiarism of curriculum.
At least we know of Karen. There are so many who suffer in silence.
“But in China, there is a saying: Only when you are good, you’re copied. Being copied by others is an indication that you’re good. ” Words to live by!
In the real world copying robs companies, people of rightful earnings.
I was in grad school and I did not copy. I got a B-. a shame to our standing. I said that it was an admission of inferiority if I could not come will all the answers on my own in a surprise test. Do we have enough intellect to be original? 🙂 TY again for the comment, very insightful!
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Some people just copied blatantly and there are some who copied and yet improve the copy and make it better for others. I have a distaste for those who merely copied but….for those who copied and make it better, I best leave the judgement to others. How do you feel about those who take the original and improve them even better?
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USPTO outlines rules for prior work. an improvement should always reference the original. How is the better measured? Opinion vs fact?
Blatant, overt or covert, an un-cited work is plagiarism and theft.
Even translations have to cede the royalties to the original work because the framework is original. A patent may argue that it does something better, but with out the original there is no improvement: The original is the pioneering work.
Here is a question that will illustrate my point : Whose shoulders did The Bard stand on?
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That is a really interesting thought, Kally! Very true, too. I think it is ok to be copied and an honor, too; if the original is credited;)
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If it’s an article or a piece of art or photo, it’s always good to be credited back. Look around us, so many things are being copied now right and some of them are an improved version of the originals. If everything is patent, then we’ll not have different brands of TV, fridge, mobile phones.
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You’re absolutely right:)
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They pay a license to original patent holder. A girl came up with the idea that one could charge a phone in seconds. She has licensed her technology and now everyone is using it. When a big automobile company stole Engineer Kearn’s wind-shield wiper idea he fought them for years. Now they have tomention his patent and pay him royalty.
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Yes, I do wish we have more innovators across the globe. I miss the innovation part about Apple. And now they are just producing what everyone is producing. The last innovation I guess just buried with its founder.
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I think it is ok to be copied and an honor, too; if the original is credited;)
Here perhaps we could say that jealousy or ‘plagiarism’ is the ultimate in flattery. My point is very simple: am I not good enough to be original? do I have to steal someones ideas not credit them? That’s the day I should stop working in that area.
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NENA, Kally, My deepest thanks for this lovely discussion. Because of you guys, I want to be a better writer, trainer!
“If everything is patent, then we’ll not have different brands of TV, fridge, mobile phones. ”
A product such as a phone is the result of 100s of patents. A team of attorneys and engineers craft contracts to ensure everyone is cited and given a license fee.
Yes, like Kally points out, it may seem like the original innovation may be dwindling. Everyday however kids are inventing. Also A Japanese scientist won the Nobel for being able to use a certain promoter that opens the door to our creating customized tissues , eventually. We will keep innovating. IF copying ideas is punished It will force people to look for alternatives. Copying decreases our ability to innovate. If i wasn’t scared of my mom, I would not have learned calculus!! LOL, I was forced to be better!
NENA, Kally, My deepest thanks for this lovely discussion. Because of you guys, I want to be a better writer, trainer!
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I think we can’t really say that what we have done can be considered original unless it is based on our own experience. Most of inventions have somehow been improved or even original ideas can be said to have come from somewhere (inspiration usually) – a person, a thing, an article, a story or even God’s creation. It will always be good if people will be compensated for their original work especially if those work are done to help mankind, however, in reality we really can’t control someone else (of course it is good if we can protect our rights). I think it as what you have said Anwynn, we should aim to be better if not best. And yes, if we have done it to the best of our ability, the weight on how we see it is what is important rather than the opinion of others. Still we sometimes are dismayed or hurt if those people we considered experts doesn’t consider our work worth their time -it is reality. I think you have the making of a very good writer and trainer Anwynn, I am no expert but I feel your passion. God bless to you! 🙂
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“Still we sometimes are dismayed or hurt if those people we considered experts doesn’t consider our work worth their time -it is reality. ”
Dismayed is the word that says sooo much about your command.
It is punishable by law to plagiarize.
Its ok if an expert wont say much but if they steal an idea.. they will face consequences.
I read every day of people being punished, fired suspended for copying.
“I think you have the making of a very good writer and trainer Anwynn, I am no expert but I feel your passion.” I really appreciate your support! I feel the same about your writing.
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Thank you Anwynn for saying that. I guess the law is there for our protection as it is really not right to just copy someone else’s work. That is why there are rules especially for academic writing. I guess, it is really the attitude, character and a person’s integrity that shows who we really are. 🙂
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“I guess, it is really the attitude, character and a person’s integrity that shows who we really are. 🙂 ”
You sound so educated! Integrity, dismayed.. such elegant words! I hope you are published very very soon!
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Thank you very much a
Anwyn, your words made me smile. I believe I use simple words as I have yet to improve my vocabulary…about being published, it is a thought but far from reality…I believe it will happen to you soon as you are passionate and puts a lot of hard work in what you do. I am looking forward to more of your work. God bless to you and your endeavors…please don’t forget to keep me updated! 🙂
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Will do that!Wish you were on twitter like NeNa, Kally and zeslee. Npw “I have to turn in.. a humble trainer/writer thanks FANTATSIC PALS like you. Must be my good Karma 🙂
Please watch Simons cat on you tube and smile! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsOYg5gpS0s
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I am on twitter but not very active…you can follow me and I will follow you back… @ShineFerrer 🙂
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Thanks for the link…It is really funny 🙂 I watched it with my baby boy…he liked it 🙂
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I THANK YOU for inspiring me!! https://iblogstats.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/the-cost-of-fighting-plagiarism-the-downside-to-theft/ Please read, leave a comment, #analytics #BigData #iOS9TH 🙂
I THANK YOU IN POST. 🙂
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Alwynn, for all the care you have given me: I have just nominated you for The Liebster Award! You can view it here:http://middleme.net/2015/10/08/the-liebster-award/
Please know that you are under no obligation to accept this award or repost it. 🙂
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Oh Kally That is the sweetest , kindest thing! I will check it out What an honor!
If I don’t turn in I will not function!
Smile! TYVM 🙂
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What may occur as plagiarism to someone may occur as “it is unnecessary to reinvent the wheel”. The fact remains that the world moves forward through reviewing what has already taken place, whether that works and then seeing how one could improve on that. How the Android Operating system was developed by Google based on Apple’s IOS is a classic example of this.
I suppose it ultimately comes down to aspects of passion and integrity and self pride one has in one’s own self and what one does.This can be the only self regulating guard one can have against plagiarism.
Shakti
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IS IT EVER OK TO NOT GIVE CREDIT. CITE AND REFERENCE OTHERS WORK , IMPROVEMENT OR NOT?
HAS ANYONE EXAMINED THE PARENT . COPYRIGHT, ROYALTY AGREEMENTS IN PLACE BEFORE CLAIMING THAT PLAGIARIZING IS OK?
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Thank you for sharing this.
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🙂 TY FOR THE ENCOURAGEMENT AND SUPPORT!
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Thanks for visiting me here. I look forward to more. HUGS
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Same to you.. Big fat hugs from me, my neighbor’s cats and twitters cat @noodlecadgetratchet 🙂 Keep writing!
Your reading my posts gives me courage!
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Reblogged this on #iblogstats.
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