Who owns University Web Courseware?

Jan Newmarch [HREF1] School of Computing, University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia jan@ise.canberra.edu.au

Keywords

Courseware, Open source, education, universities, control, intellectual property, intellectual privacy, ownership

Abstract

There is a strong push by universities for staff to place courseware online, accessible by the Web. Many of the reasons given for this are good, but this paper argues that there may be other reasons that are not stated explicitly and which result in a shift in power structures between the academic and the ``university''. Some ways to counteract these are discussed, even though these are not being adopted by universities.