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Minutes of Meetings:
January 23, 2002; Steinmetz 237, 2:45 pm

Present:  Batson, Bauman, Boyer, Cossey, Keller, Klein, McFadden, Sener, Smith, Traver

Join an online discussion of Academic Computing at Union College

Review of last meeting's minutes

1. Future agenda items. Doug circulated a list of possible topics for discussion for the balance of this (and possibly next) term.

1.  Intellectual Property policy for wholly online courses - Tom McFadden is working on a draft which he will circulate when it is ready.

2.  How to help more faculty who have not been involved at all with electronic classrooms, Bb, web pages, but would like to be.

3.  Topics for a Spring conference on teaching and technology.

4.  Required notebooks campus-wide; invite someone from Bio and someone from Div. 4.  Is this a direction worth considering?  We did not think so several years ago; have things changed?

5.  MIT OpenCourseWare initiative.  What does it mean for Union?  Should we participate? As net lenders or net borrowers?
For those unfamiliar with the program, look at:  http://web.mit.edu/ocw/

6.  Role of student consultants and U*STAR - invite Val and Shaker.  This discussion could be of use in preparing grant renewal proposal.  It could also relate to topic #2.

7.  Future developments for web advising - invite Dave Ruel;  Penny Adey.  This discussion should be later in term, after faculty have had some experience using the new web advising system.  http://webadvising.union.edu

8.  Expending Mellon and Keck funds.

9.  Suggest other topics.
Cherrice suggested discussing: 
-- We're planning to install NAS to provide student files to all engineering labs. What will it take to make them available from dorm rooms? from off-campus? Are there any additional issues with serving licenses for software in this manner?
-- We'll probably move to Windows 2000 for labs (unless XP is better?) Does ITS plan to do so in the next year?

Tom S. asked to give a web office update.

2. Intellectual Property Rights Policy.  Tom M. distributed a draft IP policy for wholly online courses.  He based this policy on a number of sources, particularly the policy at Stevens Institute of Technology which has been widely covered and generally acclaimed.  Relevant links follow:

• Union College's patent policy, from the Faculty Manual.
• Draft of Stevens Institute of Technology Intellectual Property Rights policy.
• Article on Stevens Institute's Property Rights policy from Educause
• Article on Stevens Institute's policy from the Chronicle of HE.
• AAUP Statement of Copyright.
• The AAUP Distance Education and Intellectual Property page.

In brief, the policy recognizes that lecture notes are traditionally owned by faculty members, while patents are traditionally owned, at least in part, by the college, by virtue of the "extraordinary" resources that the college typically invests in enabling a patent to be established.

Our object is to Take those basic policies and apply it to wholly online courses.  If the College has put a lot in, it gets retains some rights, and the faculty members who contributed to the course also retain rights.  The key feature of the Stevens policy is this notion of shared rights.

Course materials developed by faculty to supplement traditional classroom courses, whether electronic or paper, are not dealt with by this policy, and are presumed to belong to the faculty member.  An exception to this might occur if the faculty member has been paid a special stipend with the specific intent of developing course materials (electronic or otherwise) for the college.

The meeting adjourned at 3:45

next meeting: January 30

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