Teaching linguistic anthropology courses online

[Alexandre Enkerli]

Colleagues,

So far, the online-only course I've been teaching (for two semesters,
so far) has been a sociology course. All of my other courses for the
past 10 years (including a few linguistic anthropology courses) have
been based on some form of blended learning (online plus
face-to-face).
Here's a summary of courses I've been teaching:
http://sites.google.com/a/informalethnographer.com/ethnography/courses/courses-summary

The online sociology course I've been teaching was prepared in advance
in that it was based on a textbook and had material included directly
on the Moodle sites for the course. (At least, that's how McGraw-Hill
sold it to the institution. The reality was much different.)
I didn't really develop "content" for this course, apart from
assignments, forum posts, and normal interaction with students. In
such a case, the protection of my own copyright has hardly been a
major issue.
But McGraw-Hill's copyright was an important issue. The publisher
basically sells licenses for use of some of the learning material for
introductory sociology (by raising the price of the textbook to be
used in those sections), This has been a major issue during both
semesters.

Overall, I notice that (at least in the United States and Canada,
where I've been teaching), while copyright protection exists for
scholars as well as for publishers, the tendency is to protect
publisher copyright more actively than scholar copyright. While it
certainly is the case that the content we put online (or distribute)
is copyrighted under Canadian or US laws, the emphasis from the
institution is more frequently on restrictions related to copyrighted
material from external publishers. In other words, the legal counsel
or equivalent role has more to do with preventing people at the
university from infringing others' copyright than with helping
"content creators" within the university with the task of protecting
their own work. My impression is that this has to do with fear of
litigation, on the part of the university. It also seems to be
involved in what we now call the "chilling effect" of copyright laws.

Personally, my approach has been to use Creative Commons licenses on
much of my own work, which mostly includes podcasts and lecture notes.
So far, I haven't written extensive learning documentation for my own
courses and I probably wouldn't do so if I were to prepare my own
online course for the first time (i.e., I would probably build the
material collaboratively over the years).

While I haven't taught a fully-online course using my own material, I
did create material for a graduate course about the "Social Web."
Again, not linguistic anthropology (sorry!). All the material for this
course will be available openly as soon as it's ready. In fact, even
assignments will be done in public.
The license for the course is the least restrictive Creative Commons
one (the so-called "CC 0" license). Because the license used is
non-restrictive, this course material can be repurposed in a large
variety of ways. The approach we're using isn't incompatible with the
"intellectual property" model, but it's decidedly not the typical
"publisher's copyright" approach.
This course hasn't been released officially, yet. But a large part of
the content is already online and has been leaked through Twitter, a
few days ago. (It's in French but several resources are in English.)
http://benhur.teluq.uquebec.ca/SPIP/inf6107/
I'd say that the effort needed of me in preparing material for this
course wasn't that significant, partly because it's a work of very
efficient collaboration with colleagues from diverse fields. We also
decided to use a fairly informal tone, which is relatively rare in
French. In addition, we integrated a lot of outside resources, partly
to avoid reinventing the wheel and partly to provide a diversity of
perspectives.
All in all, helping build this course has been among the most positive
professional experiences I've had recently.

There's now a wealth of openly accessible learning material in a
variety of fields. I haven't really used open access material in
linguistic anthropology, yet, but I'm currently using a Wikibook as
one textbook for a blended course in introductory sociology.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology/


I know I'm not answering Jim's questions very directly. But I still
thought I'd chime in.

Cheers!

--
Alex Enkerli, Part-Time Faculty
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Concordia University

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 20:44, Ken Ehrensal <k.ehrensal at mac.com> wrote:
> At Kutztown and within the PA State System of Higher Education, our faculty
> collective bargaining agreement clearly lays out that intellectual property
> rights remain with the faculty who develops a specific version of a course.
>
>
> Ken Ehrensal
> k.ehrensal at mac.com
>
>
>
> On Nov 4, 2009, at 8:04 PM, Jim Wilce wrote:
>
>> Dear colleagues,
>>
>> I am assuming that many of us teach hybrid courses with lots of online
>> resources, combined with face-to-face contact in lectures or seminars. I'm
>> wondering, however, about experiences you might have had with teaching
>> linguistic anthropology courses in an ALL online "environment."
>>
>> I must say I've been taken aback in hearing "conversion stories" from some
>> respected local colleagues (not linguistic anthropologists) who deeply
>> distrusted the whole idea but have come to see it as potentially very
>> effective, and despite a streak of paranoia they feel their intellectual
>> property rights are adequately protected in offering courses online. (On the
>> downside, they also tell of investing huge amounts of time in developing
>> online courses.)
>>
>> Until now I've only used Blackboard/Vista to supplement face-to-face
>> meetings with students, undergrad as well as grad. Hence my curiosity.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Jim
>>
>> --
>> Jim Wilce, Professor of Anthropology
>> Northern Arizona University
>> Editor, Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture
>