Access to Another's Courses

[John_Lowe]

Does your institution have a formal policy that describes who is allowed to have access to another instructor's course in Canvas?  If so, would you kindly share your policy doc or URL?

Specifically, these are the types of scenarios that I'm curious to see how they'd be addressed at other institutions:

• An instructor dies, gets ill, or is otherwise unable to continue teaching the course.  Who can request access to that instructors courses for the purpose of continuing teaching the current course with minimal disruption?
• An instructor leaves abruptly at the end of the term and forgets to turn in grades.  Who can access the course on behalf of the instructor to submit final grades?
• An instructor gets reassigned to a different course or department before the course begins, but after content is loaded in the Canvas course shell.  Does the new instructor have access to the existing course content or do you somehow reset the course?
• An instructor leaves the university and deletes ALL of the course content (including assignments, grades, etc.) from their course before leaving the university.  The department chair is concerned about some students protesting their grade and requests access to the course.  Who has access to the course as-is, and do you undelete the course content to restore full access to the course content?

[John_Lowe]

If it helps spur the discussion, I'll start.  We don't have a formal written policy per se as it relates to Canvas.  Our working procedures have fallen in line with general Baylor policy that states that anything created by Staff is considered work-for-hire and belongs to the University, and anything created by faculty is considered the intellectual property of that faculty member.  With this in mind, we generally do not give access to courses belong to another instructor without the consent of the original instructor.  In special situations like scenario #1 and #2 above, we will accept alternate authorization from the Department Chair or Division Dean since those are the people who would make the official faculty course assignments anyway.  Until recently, we've never had to deal with the last scenario, but I'm asking now (for a friend ).

[awilliams]

Click on the following links to find Coconino Community College's Intellectual Property Policy and Procedure. In practice, this means the college retains ownership to the content in most cases. We still employ a humanistic approach to professional courtesy, however. If an instructor is still with the college, they will be contacted for permission before using the content in any way. If an instructor is no longer with the college, or is unable to be reached in a reasonable time frame, a Dean can grant this permission. We also encourage faculty to use https://community.canvaslms.com/community/answers/commons?sr=search&searchId=7d9f26b7-95b3-4042-891b...‌ to share content within the institution.

Ultimately, we've tried hard to work towards moving to a model of reimbursing faculty for work towards creating "master" courses, which not only alleviate many of the IP concerns, but also streamlines the process and allows the college to ensure other aspects of quality course design before making such course materials available to other faculty. This is still a work in progress though.

[kblack]

I'm in a similar position to yours,  @John_Lowe ‌ and do pretty much what you do. Our intellectual property policy definitely leans towards the faculty owning the rights to their course.  If a person like a program director or Dean within the School assures me that the first faculty member was compensated for developing the course, I will take their word for it and copy the material over.  However, in all other cases I will require--at the very least--an email from the faculty member of the original course site allowing the material to be copied.  In several cases (2 this week!) that faculty member has left the institution.  But I still require getting an email from the original faculty member.  Faculty appreciate this policy; in some cases program directors/Deans do not. I imagine as we tilt towards more online offerings that this may be looked at again.  I will often tell people that if the Dean of the School gives their permission for me to copy the course, I will do it...but I make sure to save that email, just in case!  We have not had any legal cases that I'm aware of, though we're a pretty small institution.

I imagine that many us, like John, are probably fielding many questions like this about this time of year!  This is all the better reason to re-publicize things like Canvas Commons or the new Blueprint courses, which I am doing in each of these cases whenever questions arise.