Open sourcing homework

Published on June 12, 2009 in Copyright, Education and Technology.

Academic source code dust-up symptom of CS education ills – Ars Technica

Short story–student puts Comp Sci class homework online under an open source license after the class is over; instructor is annoyed.

My quick take on this is that it sounds much like paranoia over sharing of test questions. I think, as academics, we should approach teaching just like research. The way that we teach should evolve over time to be constantly improving. This includes revising test questions and assignments every time a subject is taught. It’s more work, but it has the added benefit of eliminating the exact problem that this professor thought he saw.

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  • Sorry not to go into more depth on the copyright issue. From what I can gather from the student's description of events, a bit of sharing of the homework assignment text was in question. Since it's pretty well understood that the student owns the copyright in his answer, the issue seemed to turn more on the issue of academic integrity. Though, it appears that others have a different opinion.
  • Thanks for posting this. My favorite quote from the article: "assignments are ultimately more valuable to the students when the work that they produce can have broader purpose than merely fulfilling academic requirements."

    John - a question for you: Why wasn't copyright mentioned here? Is it true that students have copyright privileges over the work they produce as a class, and can then publish it in any way they choose?
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