Instructional Technology: Policies

College Policies on Course Connect

The use of Course Connect for all courses is required. According to college policy, all relevant course materials should be archived on the Course Connect site, including

• Syllabus
• Learning objectives (can be included in syllabus)
• Schedule of assignments (can be included in syllabus)
• Grading plan and policies, including specific details about how grades will be communicated to students (e.g. Course Connect grade book, or other means)
• Contact information for instructor (can be included in syllabus)
• Plan for emergency remote instruction for each course either as a section of the syllabus or as a supplemental document. This plan should include a:
  • plan and platform for communicating with students
  • plan and platform(s) for continued instruction of course content (assignments, video lessons, synchronous meetings, etc.)

Course Closure Policies

All courses will be archived two weeks after grades are due each semester. Our course closure policy is designed to help protect all users and maintain academic integrity across campus. Our current policy of closing courses two weeks past the end of the semester is designed based on the policies of similar institutions. We have three main motivations behind closing courses, namely:

1. To align Course Connect policies with wider institutional policies;
2. To prevent any kind of accidental copyright infringement; and
3. To prevent student access to courses (specifically, their ability to submit to assignments) past the end of the semester.

Under fair use, professors are protected and able to use some copyrighted materials for educational purposes. However, when the course is no longer being taught these protections disappear, as the materials have to be limited to students formally enrolled in the course by the college. Additionally, closing courses allows us to prevent students from submitting work to assignments from previous semesters either purposely or by accident, and helps to greatly reduce confusion about course access amongst students.

For more information, please see the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). Additionally, the US Copyright Office has an excellent memorandum on copyright in digital education found here. Marqueete University also lays out the laws as they apply to online courses in a very accessible manner here.

Copyright and Archiving

Faculty Responsibilities
Use of the Course Connect requires faculty commitment to the following:

1. While using Course Connect, faculty should recognize there is an ongoing risk of technical problems including, but not limited to, server and network downtime and software "bugs."
2. Faculty should keep their own local copies of all important course-related files, which may include the course grade book and any files or material that have been uploaded to the Course Connect server.
3. Although Course Connect is a closed environment, faculty are responsible for ensuring that they do not infringe copy right with the resources they choose to include in their Course Connect space. The Columbia University Libraries has some useful information on their site - Posting Course Materials Online. If you have questions about our copyright policy, contact the Millsaps-Wilson Library.

Course Archiving

• Academic Courses

1. So the system can operate efficiently and to accommodate future growth of Course Connect, courses are retained for 4 years and then purged from the system. For example, a course from Spring 2009 will be deleted after Spring 2013. Faculty will be notified before their course is deleted.
2. If faculty wish to retain the course for their own records, they may back up all or part of their course to a zipped format and store it in another location. Or faculty may request that the Course Connect administrator make a zipped copy of their courses(s) on CD-Rom or other external media.  Faculty are required to provide the external storage media.
3. The Course Connect software will change over time and so no guarantee is made that archived courses will be restorable on future versions of Course Connect software. 
4. Final grades entered into Course Connect are not considered part of the official academic record. Only grades submitted to the Registrar's office are the official academic record.

• Non-academic / Special Courses (Clubs, organizations, committees, etc.)

1. Special courses will be kept active until the owner requests the course to be removed from Course Connect. Owners of these courses may back up their course content at any time and store it on their own computer based on the needs of the represented group. Owners may be contacted on a yearly basis by the Course Connect administrator to determine if the course is still in use.