With respect to User Content you submit or otherwise make available in connection with your use of the Site, and subject to the Privacy Policy, you grant Coursera and the Participating Institutions a fully transferable, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to use, distribute, sublicense, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such User Content.Compare this message from the instructor which we received early on in the course:
Please remember that the essay belongs to the essayist. None of us has the moral or, under U.S. copyright law, the legal right to post someone else's essay. One does have the right to post a brief quotation if one is using that "for the purpose of criticism or review" (again, quoting U.S. copyright law), but one can probably do just as well with paraphrase. ("In an essay I read, the writer asserted that....") Even if one is praising a fellow participant, lengthy quotes are not legal.Well, judging by the Terms-of-Service, it appears that the essay does not really belong to the essayist after all - it also belongs to Coursera. So, as fellow students, we don't have the right to post someone else's essay without permission, but that same limitation seems not to apply Coursera. Instead, Coursera seems to have secured the right to re-use the essays whenever and however and for whatever reason they want.
Now, speaking just for myself, I would be glad for my essays to be re-used. Far better for someone to get some use of them rather than having them just go into the virtual trash can. That's one reason why I posted my essays at an open portfolio site. Future iterations of this course, in my opinion, would benefit greatly from the re-use of past essays as models of student writing so that students unfamiliar with essay-writing could have a gallery of styles and options to browse through and learn from.
Meanwhile, though, what prompted me to write this blog post was to note that while the instructor of the course seems to think we retain the copyright to our essays, apparently we do not.
All your essay are belong to us.
I believe that "non-exclusive license" means that you still have the rights to your own content except that you cannot prohibit Coursera to publicly display it. It may be that your old forum posts will remain and be visible to future students who did not participate to this instance of the course.
ReplyDeleteNow about the re-use of essays: on the Internet History course a peer grader posted on the forum someone else's essay for the first peer assessment assignment just as an example of a very good essay.
Looks like some students then recycled this essay (almost word-for-word with spelling errors included) as their own for the third peer assessment. Unfortunately two of them ended up to be graded by the same peer...
Oh yes, absolutely, you do still have your rights (that would be pretty crazy if Coursera told me I couldn't publish my stuff on my own blog), but it also sounds like there is no opt-out option. So, if for some reason I didn't want Coursera to be able to include my work in, say, a textbook that they sell for the course to future students, there's no thing I could do about that.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that kept happening in our class was that people were getting accused of plagiarism just for having posted their essays at their own blogs. Pretty crazy! Some people were using plagiarism-tracking software without any real understanding of how it works. I am glad I am not one of the people who was unfairly accused of plagiarism in that way. For me, it was definitely important to put my essays online openly (I take the "open" in a MOOC very seriously... the more open, the better!), but some people at the discussion forums said they had decided not to publish their essays, exactly because they were afraid of being accused of plagiarism. Ouch.
I'd add that open online courses, even of the x-variety, should encourage student networks and blogs outside the silo (the expression toxic treehouse also comes to mind). Of course, that would mean less trackable keystrokes outside the system.
ReplyDeleteI appreciated the blogs posting writing assignments. For reasons of my own that may not be as or even at all relevant, I decided at the beginning to follow that particular presumption on anonymity and blog later.
In retrospect, I would not do it again but still don't see much point or value in Forum-as-anarchists-commune ~ and too time consuming even if I did. Forget about contributing to a Wiki that is not open.
Hello,
ReplyDeleteIs it allowed to republish your excellent post on http://myeducationpath.com/vendors/2/Coursera.htm ? I will put backward link.
I want to gather reviews of coursera in one place.
Thanks.
This is not a course review - but thank you for letting me know about your site! I will write a review there. At the moment, the class is not over yet (there is a big argument going on now about the grading) - but as soon as the course is over I will be sure to write a review at your site. Thank you for letting me know about that!
DeleteThanks to Laura for the link here.
ReplyDelete