Thank you

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This is it! Tonight is my last official post for EME6414, Summer 2023. What to write about? If you had asked me a few hours earlier, my honest answer would have been "no idea". It's not I don't have anything on my mind (I may have too much actually), but I was not sure how to approach this last post. So, I've decided I'll do just as usual and draw a few personal reflections. To help me tackle this last challenge, I went back to Canvas and get an overview of our Modules Main Page. Gosh, what a journey it has been! The first image that comes to my mind is the iceberg metaphor. You know, this impression that for years, you had been exploring the World Wide Web with confidence, as if you were in your own neighborhood, with your own habits, hanging out with the same people, getting what you were looking for, not less, not more. And one day, you realize that you were just scratching the surface and that a whole world was lying underneath, inviting you to a whole new...
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Can we keep a record of our online courses?

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This is a new kind of post for me: one full of questions and in need of filling knowledge gaps with a collaborative endeavor.

I love learning remotely. Thanks to the affordances of digital technologies, online courses allow us to learn with a variety of strategies and activities. More and more, we expand our knowledge and skills by reading peer-reviewed publications, exploring materials like videos, slides, and written documents created by our instructors or reshared by them, or confronting our views with those of our classmates through threaded discussions.

Overall, online courses consist of a mix of materials and thoughts from individuals, whether members or external and sometimes unaware contributors. Based on this observation, I am wondering: just like we do during offline courses with personal notes and printed materials, can we keep a record of our online courses?

Personally, I find discussion threads highly valuable to shed light on complex or obscure concepts, and I often go back to them once the course is completed to review inputs like comments or shared materials. But what if I wanted to save these discussions on my computer? Is it legal? Are there some rules or norms FSU or Canva have informed me about and that I missed?

I know by logging on Canvas that our university reminds us that selling course-related materials to other students is illegal (and it seems obvious to me but still, it's important to remind it several times during the year to protect the institution, faculty, and students participating to those courses).

In addition, a few weeks ago, I emailed Canva Technical Support to have information, but the answer I received was not what I was looking for. In brief, they told me I could access the course as long as I had an FSU email address, and provided that the instructor does not shut down access at some point. They also said I could save materials like Word and PPT documents. But this did not answer the questions: is it legal? Is it ethical?

I also looked at the Florida State University Academic Honor Policy, but ethical concerns about saving courses' content are not mentioned. And nothing really enlightening in academic papers or elsewhere.

Dr. Dennen brings a lot of enlightening points in a paper published in 2016 (see reference below), but also shows that rules, norms, and policies are not that clear and even exist regarding the ownership of digital course artifacts.

So, I'm asking for your thoughts with the following questions:

  • Do you keep a record of your online courses and if so, what kind of information do you keep?
  • Do you think we should ask our instructors and classmates for their approval before keeping a record of collective materials and discussions? Do we think we should agree on intellectual property, sharing policies, and data privacy as a collective when the course begins?
  • If you keep a record of your courses, do you plan to keep these contents for personal purposes only, or have you experienced using some elements of these courses to support your own ideas and projects? If so, do you give credit to the thoughts and work of others or do you consider your personal interpretation of their input makes their initial inputs "free of use"?

Let me know what you think, as classmates, instructors, and more generally as online produsers!

Thank you all :-)









Source: https://staysafeonline.in/topic/internet-ethics (and I don't even know if I can share this image, this is stressful!)

Reference: Dennen, V. P. (2016). Ownership of digital course artifacts: Who can access and use your words, images, sounds, and clicks. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 17(4), 5-19.

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