Analysis: Setting the payment standards of online-education

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by Mark K. Anderson

(IDG) -- In a town where the chief export is image, Ed Condren seems well-cast in the role of the affable professor. A Chaucer scholar with snow-white hair, he works at a desk stacked with tomes on medieval literature. His office, in a boxy 1950s-era hall on the UCLA campus, is not even air- conditioned; it swelters serenely on a Southern California summer day. Outside his window, jacarandas bloom.

But Condren sees trouble on the horizon. Indeed, he's placed himself in the middle of a steadily intensifying dispute between university professors and administrators over who owns the lifeblood of higher education: intellectual property.

Before now the ground rules were clear. Universities owned the rights to patents developed by professors and paid them a percentage of the revenue, if any. Professors owned the rights to material they published and collected a few royalty checks. All was quiet on the campus front. Then came the Internet. It has opened up a market in online education that is estimated soon to reach into the billions of dollars.

As usual on the Net, those who move more quickly stand to profit more. And so far, universities are winning the race by default. Many have already penned deals with online education vendors to package and sell their courses to consumers and corporations. Meanwhile, Condren says, most professors are still stumbling around looking for their shoes.

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The ambitious on campus are well aware that there may be a great deal of money as potential income from [online education]," says Condren. "Faculty are minimally aware that what they do could someday be of some interest to the marketplace. And when I say minimally aware, I mean very, very little awareness."

UCLA Extension and its e-partner, OnlineLearning.net, run the country's largest online education program. Since fall 1996 more than 12,000 students have enrolled in classes with OnlineLearning instructors -- typically recent Ph.D.s, experts in the field and the like -- who usually aren't paid extra when their courses are put on the Web. Condren fears that as the demand for courses grows, curricula developed by UCLA professors will be sucked online as well, without due compensation. To prevent that, he's campaigning for full faculty ownership of courses they have developed. On campuses across the country, those who stand to profit from online education are watching closely to see if he succeeds.

Different online schools use different systems of payment. Pure online schools like Capella and Jones International use an unambiguous work-for-hire arrangement -- their content designers hold no stake in the courses they create. Meanwhile, brick-and-ivy schools that have gone online have struck a variety of deals with Internet partners.

UCLA Extension's online education program evolved from a 1993 deal to distribute courses on videocassette. It was not a lucrative venture. Then, in 1995, the video distributor changed its name to OnlineLearning.net and proposed putting classes on the Web. UCLA Extension, which is self-supporting, recognized huge potential in the market and signed up.

Robert Lapiner, dean of UCLA Extension, describes the online effort as simply an expansion of the video endeavor. "There is no 'distribution' by Extension or by OnlineLearning.net of the 'content' outside of the secure online class with registered students. Hence, the concern about infringement of instructors' intellectual property or copyrights with regard to traditional forms of distribution is unwarranted. Our instructors own the intellectual property of what they prepare or teach for us online. We own nothing, except as the university the right to alter the curricula."

But there's the rub, Condren says. Before Extension can transfer any material to the Web, he argues, it must first obtain the rights from the owners: the instructors. "What [the contract] practically means is that I may own the house, but you have the right to rent it to somebody and get revenue from it. In other words, it's absurd. Federal law makes it abundantly clear that the ownership of copyright means the right to market, distribute and so forth."

If the UCLA arrangement goes unchanged, Condren fears, it could set a precedent on campuses nationwide. So he's taken it upon himself to prevent that from happening. He's not as unlikely a gadfly as he might seem. In between his Chaucer studies he's built a booming career as an expert on entertainment-industry law. Pages 6 to 9 of his C.V. are filled with the names of celebrities who have hired him to testify in copyright, contract and libel cases in the past three decades: Kelsey Grammer, Joan Rivers, Blake Edwards, the Beatles, Larry Flynt.

Clearly, Condren knows his topic. He also has a number of allies, most vocal of whom is David Noble, a professor of history at Toronto's York University.

"It's very simple. The question is who owns the copyright," Noble says. "Ed Condren and I say the instructors do. So do UCLA Extension and OnlineLearning.net -- now. But in the bundle of rights which is called copyright is distribution rights. And the legal owner of the copyright has to have somehow assigned that right to someone -- either directly to OnlineLearning or indirectly via the university -- in order for OnlineLearning to have that right. In other words, how can two things be true: The instructor owns all the rights and OnlineLearning has some rights?"

Noble has been following UCLA Extension's online maneuverings from a distance and has written a series of essays, called "Digital Diploma Mills," that focuses on the UCLA Extension-OnlineLearning partnership. In fact, his articles have become a sort of faculty-ownership manifesto -- distributed widely over the Internet and cited in coverage from the Atlantic Monthly to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

He knows how to dramatize his subject matter. "The faculty retaining ownership is the last bulwark of defense of the universities as they exist," Noble exclaims. "It's high noon."

Click here for an unabridged version of this story.

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