The University of Texas at Austin Copyright Policy stipulates that copyright in course materials usually belongs to the faculty member who creates them. (Check with your department chair to confirm that this is the case in your department.) That means that you can specify who may reproduce and distribute your course materials. There are two common actions that faculty often follow regarding their content:
- Allow the use of course material for educational, non-commercial purposes. MIT's Open CourseWare and Yale's Open Courses are two examples of successful initiatives under which faculty members allow their lectures, syllabi, and other course materials to be freely shared and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Open course material supports the broad educational mission of the university. The material is still not allowed to be posted to commercial sites, but there is little need since any student can find it on the web.
- Limit the use of material on commercial sites. There are a number of commercial sites, the most prominent of which is Course Hero, that encourage students to post materials. While students are only supposed to post material that they have created or for which they have permission to post, in many cases faculty-authored material is posted without permission. The rest of this wiki offers steps to follow for faculty who want to locate, and request removal of, copyrighted course materials posted for resale on Internet sites such as Course Hero.
