Requiring specific licensing for optional coursework - is it OK?

Question

To gain extra credit for a course I lead, students can share their notes from a lecture which we intend to use as starting point to develop a better (free) learning material than just sharing slides from the lectures. To this end we explicitly asked the students to share their notes under a Creative Commons license.

At this point I have second thoughts whether this is completely OK ethically/legally. I would intuitively think that requiring students to waive some of their rights as authors would be problematic if the assignment was necessary to complete the course. Doing so for optional extra credit (which then lowers their point limit for the final exam) seems less problematic, but I am not sure this is actually a good enough distinction. Thanks for any notes/feedback.

I should also note that using student's work to build educational material is likely already allowed due to our country's laws (Czechia, EU) on intellectual property where work created to obtain academic credentials is explicitly allowed to be be "used by the academic institution for its internal needs and for educational purposes", no permission from the author required. CC licensing is still a step further, though.

Answer 1

You should definitely consult a corporate lawyer at your academic institution for a definitive answer, but I will offer my thoughts.

First, the excerpt that you quoted does not seem to apply to the situation that you are asking about: "work created to obtain academic credentials is explicitly allowed to be 'used by the academic institution for its internal needs and for educational purposes'". Licensing work under Creative Commons goes far beyond internal use.

Second, I do not think students should ever be forced to give up their copyright or the freedom to exercise their copyright. (Licensing under Creative Commons would mean that the students forego their freedom to exercise some of their copyright privileges.) Offering extra credit is not directly forcing the students but it is definitely pressuring them by compelling them to forego some of their rights in exchange for free credit. I would consider this unethical.

For some background, I am on my institution's research ethics board, and we would definitely not permit a similar situation in a research context. Even though your situation is not a research context, it is similar in that students are being offered extra credit for something which they might otherwise consider to not be in their best interest.

My institution's research ethics board takes a creative approach to research ethics, by which I mean that we try our best to help researchers to design ethical research rather simply saying no to proposals. Along those lines, here is my proposal for something that might work better:

I propose that you offer extra credit to all students who are willing to share their notes and you let the matter of Creative Commons licensing be completely optional. For students who decline the Creative Commons license, you give them the credit but do not incorporate their work in what is publicly shared with the rest. However, you should take the time to educate the students on the benefits of such licensing. In particular, highlight that Creative Commons licensing requires people to cite the work when used, and so this would give the students visibility and appreciation. (However, you must be responsible to also inform them of the implications of the irrevocable release of their work.) If you do this, you would probably find that most students would willingly choose the Creative Commons license.

Answer 2

The operative word for me is "ask". To my mind, there's nothing wrong with asking students to do this. But I agree that tying grades to this request is problematic. This no longer makes it a free choice. And presumably part of the point of this exercise is to encourage students in future to share their work freely for the benefit of others. This point is in my opinion, somewhat undermined if they feel coerced to do it in order to get a better grade.

In my opinion, a better way of doing this would be that the extra credit is only tied to sharing the notes with you. You can attach to this a request to licence the notes under CC but the grade should not be dependent on that. I suspect most students will happily do so.

Answer 3

Your question essentially amounts to: "is it ok to sell extra credit to students?" You are offering them marks if they give you something with intrinsic value: the rights to use their notes.

It is probably the case that the monetary value involved is very low, but the principle remains. Would you have problems giving extra credit to students in exchange for buying a coffee and delivering it to your office? Or to those who paid you €5?

Edited to add: Discussion in the comments led me to appreciate something that I think is important here. The proposed 'extra credit' task here (publish your notes with a given license) has minimal educational value for the student concerned. This is in marked contrast to alternatives such as "write a Wikipedia article" or "contribute to an open-source software project", where concrete learning outcomes can be identified: e.g. consolidation of knowledge, communication skills, coding experience, etc. In those cases, extra credit is (or at least can be argued to be) given for demonstrating the ability to apply knowledge in 'the real world'. In the OP's case, the credit is simply offered as an inducement to act in a certain way.