How to acknowledge a colleague's authorship of text in a syllabus

Question

Here is a situation that I have been in several times, but have only recently begun to give careful thought to. Suppose you are asked to teach a course that you have not taught before. A fairly common practice (at least where I teach) is to approach the colleague(s) who taught the course most recently and ask if you can adapt their syllabus (on the grounds that reinventing the wheel is in nobody's interest). In every case in my experience, the colleagues have freely given me not only their syllabi, but also their assignments, exam questions, and any other instructional materials that they used, and have given me permission to make use of them however I wish.

Of course being something of a control freak, I never use those materials without re-engineering them somewhat; like many (most?) academics, I feel the need to take ownership of the course by putting my own stamp on it. But I do usually take large chunks of those older course materials and incorporate them into my own. I suspect this is not uncommon (although maybe I am just wrong on this point).

It has only recently occurred to me that if one of my students did something comparable to what I do -- copy large blocks of text from somebody else's work and insert it into their own without attribution -- it would be a clear case of academic misconduct. And I would never dream of doing something like this in a work that was intended for publication. But somehow until now, doing this in a purely instructional context has always seemed innocuous.

So my questions:

1. How common is this practice?
2. Is it generally viewed as a form of plagiarism (and have I just been oblivious to something that should have been obvious to me all along)?
3. If one does make use (with permission) of a colleague's course materials, is there an appropriate way to acknowledge that? For example, by putting an "Acknowledgement" note at the bottom of the first page of the syllabus? At the very least, doing something like that would model good behavior for one's students.

Answer 1

This sort of practice is quite common, and documents of this type are often treated as the "community property" of a department. This is a lot like authorship on a community wiki, where there is no expectation that the document is the original work of any author and there is the expectation that further authors may freely modify and contribute more text. It is therefore not plagiarism to use your colleagues notes as a base, any more than it is plagiarism to contribute to a Wikipedia article.

Often, these documents have no copyright or authorship markings, and are simply handled by custom and tradition. If you want to make the collective agreement more explicit and remove any doubt for those that come after you, then you should probably select a creative commons license (like CC0 or CC-BY) and put a small marking to that effect in the header or footer of the document. If you choose to formalize it in this way, however, you should explicitly get your colleague's consent as well, because you are moving the document beyond the informal method of relationship-based exchange in which it was given to you.

Answer 2

It is an extremely common and very accepted practice to copy other people's courses in their entirety or partially, with or even without asking for permission. At least in my field (computer science) people often put course material online with the intention of letting others use them freely. Unless explicitly written otherwise on a course website, I usually assume that it is ok to use any freely available material from there. Of course if someone actually gives you the material then there's no problem at all.

There is a big difference between journal papers, the sole purpose of which is to present new knowledge, and courses, where the goal is to teach known material to students. In the first case there is always a claim of originality, and if you are copying other work you are therefore commiting plagiarism. In the latter case, as long as there is no implicit claim of originality there is no problem.

People still like to be credited for their work, though. So for the sake of honesty and also giving credit, I usually tell my students where I got any significant part of the course material. If my course has a Web page, I state my sources there as well, and provide links to relevant notes or course Web pages when it's possible.

Answer 3

I think that even when one has permission to use the results of someone else's efforts, a word of thanks is always appropriate, and perhaps a reference to a URL or such. This also does set a good example for students.

For that matter, even if "the facts" are 100+ years old, as often happens in mathematics, insightful presentations are not automatic... and deserve acknowledgement.

Analogously, even though some disparage Wikipedia, if one has literally used Wikipedia to obtain useful links, keywords, bibliographic pointers, I strongly believe one should acknowledge this. Be honest! Not only to give credit where credit is due, but to avoid false pretenses (to students, et al) about how the enterprise actually works.