http://www.clemson.edu/~marrm/school.html
There are over 20 courses listed at various schools including Stanford,
Clemson, Vanderbilt, Oregon State, Ohio State, University of Texas. It
appears that many currently known business school courses on the Web
have been "collected" for hypertext linking at this site. I've checked
out some of the material and it appears quite good. Some of the names
are well known and highly respected.
This raises a variety of important issues: (1) If M.I.T. were to put
many of its courses on the open WWW, how are we to prevent numerous Web
students from taking the courses (but without credit, of course).? How
does a faculty member protect her copyright on the material? Or
M.I.T.'s copyright interests? (2) How is M.I.T. to protect its market
niche and market share with burgeoning competing courses on the WWW?
(3) How will (should) M.I.T. respond when the inevitable occurs: other
universities actively market to either our own students or to our
prospective students via WWW technology?
The clock is ticking and we do not have much time to sort out numerous
very large issues. I do not think these issues will be resolved in any
reasonable manner in our EVAT report. But we do owe it to M.I.T. (1) to
point out the potentially huge opportunities and risks here and (2) to
suggest immediate steps to educate our faculty and administration and
(3) to set in place a process whose outcome will be a definitive
strategic plan of action.
Looking forward to our next meeting, hopefully our last prior to release
of the report.
Dick Larson