)http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/61139
Dian Schaffhauser, "Publishers Sue Georgia State over Digital Distribution," Campus Technology, 4/22/2008, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=61139
atw
Just saw this article this morning. I am in the middle of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. This response by the publishing industry is interesting in light of Shirky's material. (I would quote more and be enlightened, but the book is at home on my nightstand! )
http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/61139
Dian Schaffhauser, "Publishers Sue Georgia State over Digital Distribution," Campus Technology, 4/22/2008, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=61139
atw
)http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/61139
Dian Schaffhauser, "Publishers Sue Georgia State over Digital Distribution," Campus Technology, 4/22/2008, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=61139
atw
A great post about a very significant development. Many Moodle users routinely import publishers material (e.g., question banks from ExamView) without considering that they are redistributing copyrighted material. They are unwittingly putting their institutions in the same legal jeopardy that Georgia State is now facing. This lawsuit gives added urgency for Moodle to get on the IMS/Common Cartridge bandwagon, as Jim Farmer and Michael Penney have suggested.
I agree. I think pretty hard about what I use in my courses, bearing copyright infringement in mind. I usually conclude that if I link to it, it is okay (since that material is already public), but I assume the risk of the link disappearing at any time (which it has, the hour before I wanted to use it in class!!). I usually conclude that a single chapter as pdf is okay. I do NOT use test bank questions from a text I am not adopting for the course or any powerpoint presentations that came with a textbook that I am not going to use. I even discard video tutorials I make that go with a specific textbook if I no longer adopt it. I think all these things are a violation of copyright.
Moodle users might be even more prone to borrowing bits and pieces of things since, to my knowledge, we don't have many "course cartridges" available for publishers. If you have already painstakingly built a course, then you certainly want to continue to use it!
I always think that this copyright problem is a very good reason why, every time we see a plea for open moodle courses in a repository, people do not come forward and share their course materials (besides the fact that they might be very customized to a particular instructor or class and therefore less useful to others). Much of what we might use in a course comes from a publisher. While I might use such materials in my own course, I think packaging it up and sharing it with the world would be a serious violation.
And every time I think of all this, I get inspired to write my own open textbook. . . But haven't had time yet! Isn't that why we go to publishers in the first place? Expert and professional content, pre-packaged for our use. But content publishers of any type don't play well with the mashup world. We are in transition. See Shirky.
atw
Moodle users might be even more prone to borrowing bits and pieces of things since, to my knowledge, we don't have many "course cartridges" available for publishers. If you have already painstakingly built a course, then you certainly want to continue to use it!
I always think that this copyright problem is a very good reason why, every time we see a plea for open moodle courses in a repository, people do not come forward and share their course materials (besides the fact that they might be very customized to a particular instructor or class and therefore less useful to others). Much of what we might use in a course comes from a publisher. While I might use such materials in my own course, I think packaging it up and sharing it with the world would be a serious violation.
And every time I think of all this, I get inspired to write my own open textbook. . . But haven't had time yet! Isn't that why we go to publishers in the first place? Expert and professional content, pre-packaged for our use. But content publishers of any type don't play well with the mashup world. We are in transition. See Shirky.
atw
And every time I think of all this, I get inspired to write my own open textbook. . . But haven't had time yet! Isn't that why we go to publishers in the first place? Expert and professional content, pre-packaged for our use. But content publishers of any type don't play well with the mashup world. We are in transition. See Shirky.
Yes! Open textbooks with all the "packaging," including shared test banks, lesson plans, slides, etc. It'd even be easy to share data on which questions have caused the most problems, etc.
And an Open Source LMS is the perfect environment for this.
It may sound weird but my thoughts at this point is that we could somehow start with the material many of us have accumulated over the years. You know, lesson plans and such. By putting them together, I get the impression we could get a good skeletton for a textbook in any commonly taught course. From there, it could be built, wikibook-like. Some people could serve as editors, others as fact-checkers, others could find primary sources for some texts, yet others could write introductory material or complete chapters. Sure, a longterm project. But the kind of project which moves relatively quickly with relatively little effort by each individual participant.
Again, Rice's CNX and the OU's material could come in handy.
Now, in terms of copyright. I'm not exactly sure what the rules are, there, but would we need to worry if we were to share, say, our customized versions of lesson plans among instructors? What I mean is: aren't we allowed to do things with copyrighted material on our own as long as we don't publish it? I know how naïve the question sounds and I did hear a number of contradictory things about fair use (in the U.S. or the equivalent elsewhere). I'm not talking about reusing images or paragraphs. But assessing the material we have and use it as a starting point. Mixing and matching some material from different publishers and then preparing a new set of modules based on the composite textbook. After all, we're usually pretty good at citation and reference.
It's just something which makes me dream.
Open Courseware is mostly just a dream today. Meanwhile, a $10 billion dollar a year textbook publishing industry is a reality. It is the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to content.
If you Google "Moodle import ExamView" or "Moodle import TestGen" you'll get hundreds of hits where people discuss how to do it. The Moodle Question engine even has an ExamView importer. All of this content is being imported from textbooks. Maybe some of them are open content, but many are surely not. If the students have purchased the textbook for the course, the import is probably defensible. But in many cases I suspect the content has been imported from textbooks that are not required. Every use of such content is cheating publishers and authors out of royalties for the use of copyrighted material.
I have an instructor account with Pearson. It cost me nothing and it gives me access to the online supplementary resources associated with all of Pearson's math and statistics textbooks. I can download testbanks into TestGen, and I can export from TestGen in Blackboard format, which I can then import into Moodle. Pearson gives me access to their material based on the assumption that my students have purchased the textbooks. However if I'm serving up Pearson's content from Moodle without requiring my students to buy the textbook, I'm doing something wrong.
Incidentally, I went through all the steps to learn how it is done, and I have helped other users do it, but I do not store any of Pearson's content in my own Moodle sites. My students have purchased the textbooks, and they access the content through MyMathLab, which is Pearson's proprietary LMS.
When someone in the moodle community raises an issue of ethics, it usually has to do with things like teachers publishing (in Moodle) content produced by their students under a presumed expectation of privacy (e.g., this discussion). So do we protect and pity the poor students, then turn around and Stick it to the Man when it comes to the big greedy textbook publishers?
If you Google "Moodle import ExamView" or "Moodle import TestGen" you'll get hundreds of hits where people discuss how to do it. The Moodle Question engine even has an ExamView importer. All of this content is being imported from textbooks. Maybe some of them are open content, but many are surely not. If the students have purchased the textbook for the course, the import is probably defensible. But in many cases I suspect the content has been imported from textbooks that are not required. Every use of such content is cheating publishers and authors out of royalties for the use of copyrighted material.
I have an instructor account with Pearson. It cost me nothing and it gives me access to the online supplementary resources associated with all of Pearson's math and statistics textbooks. I can download testbanks into TestGen, and I can export from TestGen in Blackboard format, which I can then import into Moodle. Pearson gives me access to their material based on the assumption that my students have purchased the textbooks. However if I'm serving up Pearson's content from Moodle without requiring my students to buy the textbook, I'm doing something wrong.
Incidentally, I went through all the steps to learn how it is done, and I have helped other users do it, but I do not store any of Pearson's content in my own Moodle sites. My students have purchased the textbooks, and they access the content through MyMathLab, which is Pearson's proprietary LMS.
When someone in the moodle community raises an issue of ethics, it usually has to do with things like teachers publishing (in Moodle) content produced by their students under a presumed expectation of privacy (e.g., this discussion). So do we protect and pity the poor students, then turn around and Stick it to the Man when it comes to the big greedy textbook publishers?
There is the College Textbook Transparency Act recently enacted in California, and the (not law yet) HR 4137 "College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007" which covers similar ground. I didn't find any discussion of HR 4137 on moodle.org.
Interesting points, John. I, too, have made similar decisions in using tests designed by publishers for books that my classes have purchased. My thinking there was that it would be no different from using the copy version the publishers provide. However, the tough part comes in now that I'm looking at sharing my course with others. I didn't always label my questions clearly for myself so that I'd know which ones I wrote and which ones were from the textbook, which means I have to either throw out all my grammar quiz questions and not share them, or I have to painstakingly go through them and see if I can tell which ones were the book's and which ones were mine. Often, my matching questions are a combo of both, though, which also means significant editing needs to be done to share with a third party.
Incidentally, I use ExamView for vocab quizzes on paper, but have not yet tried to import into Moodle. I've found that just importing my old quizzes from Word can be buggy. I lose apostrophes or other important punctuation all of the time. In my subject area, the test is usually ON the apostrophe when this happens. Very ironic, yes, and I would be amused if I didn't have thirty confused students in front of me at the time. Does this happen with import from other programs, too? Just curious what the experiences of others has been.
Regarding "sticking it to the man." I'm not sure, but I guess if enough of us make our own materials available, and they are good enough that other teachers want to use them instead of expensive texts, the textbook industry might find itself in the same fix as the music industry. From what I've heard about Nine in Nail's recent internet release, though (is it true--$1 million dollars?), people are figuring out how to make money that way instead of through CDs. No doubt there will be a similar shift (after a MUCH longer time, considering how much more entrenched academia is in its "traditions") in publishing.
Incidentally, I use ExamView for vocab quizzes on paper, but have not yet tried to import into Moodle. I've found that just importing my old quizzes from Word can be buggy. I lose apostrophes or other important punctuation all of the time. In my subject area, the test is usually ON the apostrophe when this happens. Very ironic, yes, and I would be amused if I didn't have thirty confused students in front of me at the time. Does this happen with import from other programs, too? Just curious what the experiences of others has been.
Regarding "sticking it to the man." I'm not sure, but I guess if enough of us make our own materials available, and they are good enough that other teachers want to use them instead of expensive texts, the textbook industry might find itself in the same fix as the music industry. From what I've heard about Nine in Nail's recent internet release, though (is it true--$1 million dollars?), people are figuring out how to make money that way instead of through CDs. No doubt there will be a similar shift (after a MUCH longer time, considering how much more entrenched academia is in its "traditions") in publishing.
Lesli,
Getting math questions from Pearson to TestGen to Moodle takes sixteen manual steps!
One reason that textbooks are so expensive is that the cost of the online material is included the textbook price. Each publisher has its own proprietary system for accessing their online material (e.g., Pearson has MyMathLab for its math textbooks). The publishers are rallying behind an IMS standard called Common Cartridge that will make it possible to download the material from any publisher into any LMS. Angel and Blackboard have already committed to the standard.
Textbook publisher-provided online materials are important as a consequence of simple economics. The majority of post-secondary teachers are adjuncts who aren't paid to develop courses. They are given a textbook and told to use the publisher's online material. As long as students foot the bill, the institution doesn't care. So if congress mandates lower prices, or if students go to the barricades, maybe it will provide impetus for a drift away from textbooks toward open content.
Jim Farmer has made several really good moodle.org forum posts about textbooks, publishers' online materials, and IMS/CC.
Getting math questions from Pearson to TestGen to Moodle takes sixteen manual steps!
One reason that textbooks are so expensive is that the cost of the online material is included the textbook price. Each publisher has its own proprietary system for accessing their online material (e.g., Pearson has MyMathLab for its math textbooks). The publishers are rallying behind an IMS standard called Common Cartridge that will make it possible to download the material from any publisher into any LMS. Angel and Blackboard have already committed to the standard.
Textbook publisher-provided online materials are important as a consequence of simple economics. The majority of post-secondary teachers are adjuncts who aren't paid to develop courses. They are given a textbook and told to use the publisher's online material. As long as students foot the bill, the institution doesn't care. So if congress mandates lower prices, or if students go to the barricades, maybe it will provide impetus for a drift away from textbooks toward open content.
Jim Farmer has made several really good moodle.org forum posts about textbooks, publishers' online materials, and IMS/CC.
The time to create these materials is huge. And getting volunteers to commit and produce them requires either self motivated passion or some arm twisting.
We are trying to produce K-12 books with the moodle test banks included.
Using CC 2.5+ articles, graphics and art is a great starting point for these projects.
Currently we are working an Earth Science, Biology and Calculus books, with the 2nd two, just in the early stages. A fourth grade Virginia Studies book has been outlined and the assessments started.
As all the material is either public domain or Creative Commons, it is easy to track what is shareable. We use an Alfresco repository with Dublin Core tags on the different parts, so we could track copyrighted material too, but we choose not to include these materials.
If anyone is serious about participating (especially K-12 educators), please let me know and I can provide access to our system. http://voef.org/projects.html
I also have just put up an open sharing spot here: http://izcool.ning.com/
We are trying to produce K-12 books with the moodle test banks included.
Using CC 2.5+ articles, graphics and art is a great starting point for these projects.
Currently we are working an Earth Science, Biology and Calculus books, with the 2nd two, just in the early stages. A fourth grade Virginia Studies book has been outlined and the assessments started.
As all the material is either public domain or Creative Commons, it is easy to track what is shareable. We use an Alfresco repository with Dublin Core tags on the different parts, so we could track copyrighted material too, but we choose not to include these materials.
If anyone is serious about participating (especially K-12 educators), please let me know and I can provide access to our system. http://voef.org/projects.html
I also have just put up an open sharing spot here: http://izcool.ning.com/