I know that in IT and other jobs where people are hired for the specific task of creating content for the employer, it’s made pretty clear when you take the job that your stuff belongs to them.
What about teachers? If you’re hired as a teacher and, in addition to the standard textbook provided by the school system, you supplement your lessons with some of your own personal material, does the employer have any right to ask you to furnish them with soft copies of, say, your PowerPoint slides or worksheets that you made on your own time, perhaps even before you were employed by the school?
I don’t know if the school district has a right to use your stuff, but they surely have the right to see what you’re using in the classroom. So, I’d say yes, they have the right to ask you to furnish copies.
If I am using it in the classroom, they can see it and tell me not to use it if they don’t like it. If I make it on my own computer at home, they don’t own it, but if it’s on their time or their computer, I imagine they do.
That’s pretty much it. If you make it on their dime, it’s theirs. If you make it on your own time, it’s yours. I agree, the district has the right to see what’s being presented in a classroom, if they choose to.
When I retired, we were in the middle of providing the district office with our lesson plans, rubrics, tests, worksheets, and daily schedule for the entire course (9th grade physical science). Basically, they wanted everything. We knew it was going to be used in some “race to the top” materials for the district and maybe for somebody in the county office’s advanced degree work. I really don’t know if this was ever accomplished, as I left mid-year.
I’ve never seen a contract that explicitly gives the school the right to make copies, but they certainly have the right to see it. And of course the school might also ask a teacher to produce material explicitly for the school’s future use, or for use by other teachers in the school.
I am not a teacher, but I once taught a course at a local community college. I taught the course for a year, then quit (I was working two other jobs). The dean asked for copies of my lesson plans, etc and was mortified when I told her I was just winging it.
I agree that they might want to see/approve of personal material to make sure you’re not sneaking in some questionable content. But that could happen by simple observation or in a one-on-one meeting with your department head.
What if your supplemental material included educational videos or software/games that you purchased to use as teaching material. What about a chemistry teacher bringing in his personal models of molecules or a special technical/professional apparatus as a visual aid - does the school have the right to appropriate those?
I think this sort of thing should be written into a contract or employment agreement unless you’re asked specifically to create some content for the school to use.
It complicates matters if you are talking about rights in Bangkok, Thailand(your stated location)-most of us are probably unfamiliar with what those rights might be.
I’m just looking for humble opinions about what people think an employer should be able to do, irrespective of location.
The only thing that’s complicated here is that there are no rules, except for those the school director makes up as needed. I do intend to post this in a Thailand teaching forum tomorrow to see what others think but I wanted to get the western perspective first.
I think that unless you are a contractor instead of an employee, or have an employee contract that states otherwise, “work for hire” for materials you produce in order to do the job the school is paying you for makes the most sense.
If you want to keep it for yourself, you can choose to create/use it only for your side gig of tutoring where you are paid by the client instead of the school district (for example). Alternatively, write a textbook on your own time, publish it, and try to convince the school district to buy it and make it part of the curriculum. But if the school district has paid you to produce it, I think it’s fair that it belongs to them.
That said, I also think it makes sense, especially in public schools, for schools not to be possessive of teaching materials. If the goal is to educate students, you should be happy to get that information out there as widely as possible.
The school can certainly ask for copies for anything you use in class for review purposes. However, giving them a copy doesn’t mean they have automatically been granted the right to use that material as they see fit. For example, they wouldn’t automatically be able to publish a book with that material included and sell it to other districts.
The specifics on whether they own the teacher’s work will depend on a lot of factors. If the school asked the teacher to create the slides, then they are owned by the school. If the teacher made the slides on the computer at school, the school owns the slides. If the teacher made the slides on his own at home as a supplement, then it probably depends on the contract. It may be in the contact that they signed that anything used in the classroom is property of the school. So if the teacher doesn’t want his custom slides taken by the district, he shouldn’t use them in class.
In IT, it’s common in the contract for any work the programmer does, whether at work or at home, to be owned by the company unless otherwise agreed to. So if I make some iPhone app on my own time, the company can claim it. The reasoning is that the problem I’m trying to solve may be related to my work. The way around this is to talk with my manager ahead of time and get approval that there’s no overlap.
As a university professor I understood that if I wrote a text or something, we were free to publish and get royalties. It was dicier if I patented something. If a university lab was involved in the work, then I would split any royalties with the university. If I wrote a piece of software and sold it, then it depended if it was on my own time or not. If there was any university involvement then they wanted half. They gave the following absurd example of university involvement: the software was on a diskette that was in my briefcase that I set down on the floor of my office. The university had provided the floor on which my briefcase was resting. Despite that, things were pretty loose and, as I said, textbooks were really our own.
Course material including exams, supplemental material, texts you authored were yours. Never was required to turn any of it over. (With the exception of the 1-2 page course handout, but that was to ensure it met certain format rules.) I frequently did hand copies over to the chair for the next prof to use as a courtesy.
Research papers would have their copyright signed over to the publisher.
Anything patentable would be reported to the college. They would decide if they wanted to patent it. If they did, you got a share of royalties. If they didn’t, you could do it on your own.
Software (this was Computer Science) was a lot more complicated. Big vs small projects. Personal use. Etc. Some things they cared about, some they didn’t. The rules were never clear about any of it.
I teach in the California State University system, in the humanities. The issue of intellectual property has been a significant talking point at our campus, and around the CSU, over the past couple of years, to the extent that a committee was created to look into how best to deal with various concerns.
One thing that made the topic more urgent was the growing demand for, and supply of, online classes. One concern of many faculty members who taught online courses was that, once the courses were up and running for a semester or two, the university would kick the faculty member to the curb and just keep using their online course. This was especially a concern because of the growing tendency of universities to rely on contingent or adjunct faculty, people on one-semester or one-year contracts with little or no security of employment.
Basically, our university policy is that anything that i create in the normal scope of my job remains under my own copyright control. This includes all “traditional academic copyrightable works,” which include:
Note also that this is the case even if i use university resources in the development and creation of those works, as long as the resources i use are those “usually and customarily provided” to faculty as part of their duties. So, if i make use of the university library, or online databases, or video equipment, or digital resources laboratory, or anything else that i have access to as a regular part of my employment, i retain copyright to the stuff i produce using those resources.
Basically, the main exceptions to this rule are:
[ol]
[li]stuff that can be patented (as suggested by others earlier in the thread).[/li][li]stuff that is specifically commissioned by the university for a particular purpose (for example, if they asked me to design a course which would then be sold to an outside provider). This sort of thing would generally involve a written contract anyway.[/li][li]stuff that necessitates an unusual and unusually excessive amount of university resources. For a historian like me, i’m not even sure what that might mean. I guess that if a designed the content for a history website of some sort, and the university agreed to let me use some of the people in IT to actually set up and maintain the site, that might be one example. I’m sure that if a scientist wanted to make long-term excessive use of a university laboratory or telescope, that might also qualify.[/li][/ol]None of this means, however, that i am immune from requests for my materials. One condition of my employment, for example, is that i submit to the university a copy of my course syllabus/syllabi at the beginning of every semester. This does not transfer copyright; it’s simply part of the accountability process, and these documents constitute one part of the (rather extensive) documentation required for retention, tenure, and promotion evaluations.