Case Study II (Students with last names beginning with Q-Z)
Your school is planning to offer online, distance education classes while concurrently revamping the school’s curriculum – something you haven’t done in more than a decade. Your team was given the additional task of discussing the ethical considerations of distance education and providing informed opinions on the issues. The findings will be combined with those of a separate team, which will be working on the technological aspects of the online courses.
During the discussion of the ethical issues, your team came to a relatively easy consensus on issues such as academic integrity, and full disclosure. There was quite a bit of disagreement, however, on the issue of ownership of archived courses. One group of professors felt adamant that the school should own the completed courses as a resource for future teaching. Another group, while seeing the merits of the first group’s opinion, felt students should own most of the content due to the massive amount of effort they put into such courses. Complicating matters further, was the school’s legal counsel, who – when invited to a meeting on the issue – warned the school could be opening itself up to litigation if it kept students from accessing their completed courses.
As a result of the legal council’s opinion, it was suggested to the team, that a dual ownership policy should suffice – in which both students and professors would be able to access completed courses for a set period of time, to be considered at a later date. In addition, students would have the ability to download materials from the LMS (Learning Management System – Canvas, Blackboard, etc.) for their personal use. The curriculum team will be meeting next week to discuss this recommendation, with the idea of coming to a consensus soon.
Questions for Consideration and Analysis:
Could the curriculum development team have done anything different to have avoided this disagreement in the first place?
Do you think the recommendation of dual ownership is a good idea? Why or why not? Could there be any unforeseen problems with his proposed solution?
If you were a member of the curriculum development team, what would you suggest as a solution to this issue?
Given what you know about the overall responsibilities of a curriculum development team, do you think it was a good idea for the university to task the team with issues related to the new distance learning initiative? Defend your answer.
Do you think any of the other ethical issues considered by the team would be related to the ownership issue, and could contribute to the solution? How so?
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