To Encourage Learning, Stop Including Journal Articles in Course-Packs

I recently received an email from the University of British Columbia explaining that Access Copyright had proposed to raised the annual fee charged to UBC for “copying material from scholarly journals, textbooks, and other materials” by a factor of three. The university and its students’ bill for 2011 will rise from $650,000 to two million dollars. It was encouraging to see that in its email, UBC stated it was “actively considering a range of options to mitigate the financial burden.” 

I’d like to propose a further option for UBC and other institutions to consider. It draws on a historical principle recently cited by Canada’s “culture industries,” including Access Canada, in a brief submitted to Parliament on this country’s current copyright reform bill. The culture industry brief declares that “copyright exists to protect creators and copyright owners… It is a core principle of copyright law, ‘on the books’ since the 18th century” and “that holders of copyright…can define the business terms on which their works will be used and re-used by others.” 

Leaving aside how this appears to misrepresent the “balance” of copyright interests (between creator and public), which and is a particular focus of this round of reform in Canada, I want to on what was placed “on the books” in the 1710 Statute of Anne, which was, after all, “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning.” 

The option I am proposing is about more, however, than mitigating financial burdens. It is about returning to copyright’s core principles, found in the encouragement of learning. To encourage learning within “the business terms” and public interests of current copyright law, the one thing that every post-secondary instructor in this country can do is to stop including scholarly journal articles in course-packs.

Most of the articles are part of the university’s online journal collection (which now go back to the first issue for many titles, thanks to JSTOR and other platforms). While these articles may still represent a small percentage of course-pack content (and we have a study underway to provide some accurate measures), let us consider far better (and cheaper) ways of using these articles in our teaching than having them bundled in course-packs.

Students can access most journal articles through the library or on Web (through legally placed open access copies). This, in itself, introduce students to the knowledge spaces in which the course topic operates. Now, please note that a syllabus listing the journal articles to be discussed in class, which I am recommending, is very different from the still-current Georgia State University court case. The scholarly publishers are suing Georgia State University for “digitizing and electronically distributing classroom materials through its electronic course reserve system and its BlackBoard-based course web software,” according to Information Today. This is not what I am recommending.

Students accessing articles to discuss in class from the library’s collection is consistent with their university’s “institutional subscription” to the journal. And it supports the journal by providing an uptick in readership, given the statistics kept by libraries in this digital era, thus further insulating them from library cancellation.

Let me turn now to the educational benefits of this approach. With each article read, students will see how research lives today in this new, dynamically interconnected environment of online, hyperlinked journals. On finding the article in the library’s online collection, students will see that the publisher provides links to related articles, to the references listed in the article so readers can follow up a source, as well as links from other works (including blogs) that have cited the article, critically or positively. Occasional reader comments may provide insight into the nature of a review culture, while background information is only a click or two away, whether from the Oxford English Dictionary, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to, forgive me, Wikipedia. 

It adds up to a reading environment that encourages that much more learning than course-packs. Students may click on but a single link in the course of their reading or follow a whole web of related ideas. They may bring questions to class about sources and the reception of the work that will enrich the class; they have a more comprehensive jumping off point for their own essays and research. Instructors can have students read different articles on a topic to then share with their classmates. It introduces into the classroom, a greater sense of how this knowledge operates, contributes, and is contested.

Some will still prefer printing articles out, although that number is decreasing, in my experience, with each passing year and each new device. And the growing number working online are managing, annotating, indexing, and sharing articles through free systems such as Zotero and Mendeley, making for longer-term use than disposable course-packs.

Some colleagues are very attached to course-packs. More than one has told me that course-packs allow them to keep students from opening their laptops in class. My only hope is that by outlining how reading research articles in situ could encourage learning (that will not take place with course-packs), they will be inspired to consider other strategies for keeping students off Facebook while they are teaching and learning in class.