Piracy of professor-authored teaching material is rampant. I’ve written about it before. Students and teaching staff have uploaded my material to Course Hero and I’m not happy about it. In spite of requesting that they don’t do it, they still do it. I write explicit footnotes in my documents saying not to do it, and it still happens.
My department here at York University voted to ask that our IT department watermark documents on our learning management system to help mitigate the problem. The request was denied by YorkU’s UIT department.
I had a look at what material is currently up on Course Hero and noticed something. Even though York University’s IT department won’t watermark material downloaded from eClass, Course Hero does. For instance, my Lab G document is available on Course Hero as are other documents that should have my name on it but don’t.
The document has a footnote that says not to use it outside of York University. But, here’s the really interesting part. Course Hero will add a footnote of its own to the PDF when you download it:
The reasons given to me that UIT will not add watermarking to PDFs on the eClass learning management system? Here they are, verbatim:
In particular the Learning Technology Governance Group had concerns with
- Watermark would contravene our efforts toward OERs and creative commons licensing.
- Seeing as this is more of an organizational policy matter, it should be addressed to the appropriate channels for academic policy.
- Potential solutions presented incur costs or the free plugin available does not seem to be well maintained with issues posted against it with no response.
- Need further discussion on potential watermarking of content not owned by instructor using it in a course
I am not satisfied with the response from the UIT Learning Technology Governance Group. And I don’t believe that the York University community should be, either. Piracy of material from eClass is a long-standing issue, there are methods for addressing it that are used within our Library system and external sites like Course Hero as well.
Update Sept 20, 2024
OER: refers to Open Educational Resources. Link added above.
James Andrew Smith is a Professional Engineer and Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of York University’s Lassonde School, with degrees in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Alberta and McGill University. Previously a program director in biomedical engineering, his research background spans robotics, locomotion, human birth and engineering education. While on sabbatical in 2018-19 with his wife and kids he lived in Strasbourg, France and he taught at the INSA Strasbourg and Hochschule Karlsruhe and wrote about his personal and professional perspectives. James is a proponent of using social media to advocate for justice, equity, diversity and inclusion as well as evidence-based applications of research in the public sphere. You can find him on Twitter. Originally from Québec City, he now lives in Toronto, Canada.