Copyright ownership for materials that teachers write on behalf of their employers is an issue that some leaders don’t wish to confront. Though materials writing is included as part of an FE lecturer’s contract, where they also teach HE courses, a lack of proper remuneration and recognition for their work is a real problem. 

Universities setting up new courses will hire subject specialists to write materials, which may include choosing the reading lists, creating lecture slides, and, in some cases, scripting videos in the form of lecturecasts. The hired course writer will be paid a fee for this work separate from the role of teaching the course. This acknowledges the amount of time, effort and expertise needed.

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Any course development fee incurred is an essential and sure investment for the university, too, since once the course is constructed, the same materials, with minor tweaks where needed, can be used for several years. With the pandemic, global students are keen to study at a UK institution from a distance and creating an online course extends the university’s market reach.

FE college lecturers not being paid for creating HE course materials

Though FE colleges offering HE courses may not have the same global market, they have a strong local pull for degree provision, which, for the past year, has largely been offered online. Indeed, FE college degree course fees are not all that much lower than those of universities - with £8,000 being the yearly fee where I work. Despite this, FE lecturers writing HE materials are not recognised for doing this, even though the courses they create will be cash earners for their colleges for years to come.  

This is an issue that FE does not wish to face. It is sad and shows both a lack of understanding of HE and a lack of commitment to the principle of fairness. It is also counter-productive, because there is no incentive for lecturers to update or upgrade their materials if there is no reward or recognition for doing so. 

With the world of research moving at a fast pace, the need to review topics on a yearly basis is important so that new theories and ideas can be incorporated into the syllabus. But this is not likely to happen and it will be the paying students who will lose out for the lack of investment that their tuition fees should cover. 

I know of some teachers who will share materials they produce with their students but do not formally offer these to their college employer, because once this happens they legally lose copyright ownership for work they have not been paid for. 

For a college to assume copyright ownership for the unremunerated efforts of their staff is morally wrong and college heads and teaching unions must urgently address this. They both have their own reasons for not doing so: colleges try to save money and unions do not wish to create divisions among members who work across FE and HE. Until they both understand that HE lecturing and FE lecturing are separate enterprises, this problem will remain. 

To not even be prepared to engage with the issue means that lecturers are forced to find their own ways of getting around the situation. This might include circulating materials as paper handouts so that nothing needs to be uploaded online to the college computers - at which point copyright would be sacrificed. It might also involve creating “student versions” of slides for online use which look very different from the “teacher versions” in class.   

Without FE colleges operating fairer terms in regards to HE teaching, no one wins, morale suffers and students will continue to get caught in the middle.

Rufus Reich is a pseudonym. The writer is a FE lecturer in England