Thread: Questions for Distance Learning instructors

I have several questions for experienced distance learning instructors.

If I had an online school, and I helped my instructors to develop online training materials, who owns the copyright to those materials?

I am an instructional designer, and so I want to assist the instructors in creating materials so the materials are consistent and effective.

I need to depend on the instructors to provide the content for the courses. I won't be able to pay the instructors until they begin teaching , and then, I will pay them per student. Many of the instructors have a "following" of sorts, so I'd like to have that as an incentive to market their courses to those people.

My fear is that the instructors may quit and then take the materials that I helped develop and use them for their own courses (without me).

What do I do then? If the courses are based on their content and writings but are presented in a way that I helped develop, who owns the copyright? Do I have any rights to it?

How is it usually handled? Do you reuse your own materials at different institutions?

My other questions concern salary. Typically, how are distance learning instructors paid? Is it hourly? Is it ever per student? How does it compare to other types of instructing?

Thank you so much!

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Upon further reading , I found the salary information I was seeking, so I don't need that information anymore.

If anyone could answer my question about the copyright of learning materials, I would be extremely grateful.

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Originally Posted by mrs_school_marm

I have several questions for experienced distance learning instructors.

If I had an online school, and I helped my instructors to develop online training materials, who owns the copyright to those materials?

I am an instructional designer, and so I want to assist the instructors in creating materials so the materials are consistent and effective.

I need to depend on the instructors to provide the content for the courses. I won't be able to pay the instructors until they begin teaching , and then, I will pay them per student. Many of the instructors have a "following" of sorts, so I'd like to have that as an incentive to market their courses to those people.

My fear is that the instructors may quit and then take the materials that I helped develop and use them for their own courses (without me).

What do I do then? If the courses are based on their content and writings but are presented in a way that I helped develop, who owns the copyright? Do I have any rights to it?

How is it usually handled? Do you reuse your own materials at different institutions?

My other questions concern salary. Typically, how are distance learning instructors paid? Is it hourly? Is it ever per student? How does it compare to other types of instructing?

Thank you so much!

Hi, I am an instructional designer and instructional technology consultant and when I work directly with universities, there is always a contract involved, that normally states that I am creating this for the university and it is their property and is their copyright.

I can tell you that without some sort of legal agreement in place you may not have a leg to stand on, where I currently work we had an individual who wanted to retain copyright for about 300 lesson plans she had created and she took us to court, but hey when she first got hired, she signed an agreement that gave the district copyright.

I would look into setting up contracts if you are working with individual instructors and are employed by them and not a particular university and make the contract so that you retain copyright. You should consult a lawyer on contract issues, I know I have and I have been fine so far or you could just stick with working with universities or companies, not individuals.

As for the pay for online instructors, that varies tremendously by the university. Some pay per course, I have seen others pay by the number of students, some even have contracts set up monthly.

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Thank you, scaredrain!

Many of the instructors I hope to hire already have loads of materials they have developed and used for years.

So in my contract with them, I guess the only thing that I could really lay claim to would be the materials (including lesson plans) that I help them develop for online use. So they would own the materials they came in with, but I would own the copyright to the new "products" developed from those materials.

I definitely plan to have lawyer-approved contracts. Unfortunately, the only copyright lawyer I know charges $550/hour. (Why didn't I become a copyright lawyer? :) ) But maybe in this economy, I can find someone more reasonable.

Thanks again!