Robert Shag, a professor of Communication at North Carolina State Univeristy, was selling podcasts of his lectures. The dean has had them yanked while she sorts out how the school feels about it.
Now, aside from the fact that a pay podcast system almost certainly negates an RSS feed which, in turn, means these lectures aren't podcasts, what's the big deal?
NCSU already has a policy in place whereby professors maintain sole ownership of materials that they produce for their class. How, then, can the school step in and tell the professors what to do with this stuff that they have sole ownership to?
"If a student doesn't want to be there, I don't want them there," Mr. Schrag said. "I want them to go away because they degrade the educational experience for the other students around them."
Sounds like a reasonable stance to me, but I'm not there. If I was a student wanting to do well by doing some extra study, I might feel differently about having to pay for the content.
Thoughts?
Via Cult of Mac.
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Students who pay the high price of tuition should not have to pay more money to review what I heard in class that day.
IMHO, punitive approaches to integrating technology with teaching and learning such as this harm not only those who do not want to come to class, but also those who do come to class.
I know this isn't as simple an issue as this response may imply, but if my students can get everything they need to pass the course from a recording of my lecture, shame on me.
This item also tends to point to a difference between "course casting" (recording a lecture), and podcasting, or podagogy, which employs specific approaches to the design and delivery of supplemental course content that augments the current topic, or prepares the student for the upcoming topic.
Posted by: Randy Meredith | September 22, 2006 8:49 AM | Permalink to Comment