Free online course offerings are suddenly in the news again. First, there were a series of articles about a Silicon Valley start-up called Coursera. See, for example, “Inside the Coursera Contract: How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses”
http://chronicle.com/article/How-an-Upstart-Company-Might/133065/
These articles led Wendy Brown, the UC Berkeley Faculty Association’s Co-Chair, to post an article titled: “Where’s UC Online Now and How Will We Get Our $7 Million Back?” (July 19)
http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/2714/wheres-uc-online-now-and-how-will-we-get-our-7-million-back
The Berkeley Daily Californian picked up on Wendy’s post and produced an article: “UC, campus looks to expand online education program” (July 22)
http://www.dailycal.org/2012/07/22/ucs-online-involvement/
And today, edX, a Coursera competitor, announced that UC Berkeley has signed on with them:
https://www.edx.org/press/uc-berkeley-joins-edx
A couple of articles prompted by the edX press release have already appeared, such as: “Free online courses divide UC professors”
http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_21144592
If any of you are considering offering a course via edX, I would be interested in what sort of contract language they use to get distribution rights to UC faculty lectures and course materials. Remember that the Faculty Associations has worked over the years to protect faculty ownership of lectures — UC does not own them. (The Coursera contract is linked to from the first article above.)