McGraw-Hill recently released their MH Campus site, which integrates with a wide variety of LMS software to give faculty direct access to content from “the vast library of educational materials and services produced by McGraw-Hill and its partners – at no additional cost to the institution.”
The concern I have is that using content from MH Campus will make it very difficult to share that course down the road. This is because their free content is not openly licensed, meaning it cannot be legally shared beyond the closed LMS.
From McGraw-Hill’s MH-Campus Terms of Service (p.3, emphasis added):
“2.1.2.1 Faculty Authorization. Subject to the Terms, Faculty Users will have access to Supplementary Content through MH Campus™ and may use such content in such manner as Faculty Users deem appropriate only for instructional purposes, only in the courses Faculty teach at Your Institution and only for the benefit of the Students enrolled in such Faculty’s courses. In addition, subject to the Terms, Faculty Users are authorized to view Textbook Content through MH Campus™, but shall be prohibited from distributing such content to other Users, including without limitation, to any Student Users.”
The LMS of the future will make it technically very easy to remove student data and openly share courses. Including bit of proprietary MH content into courses will slow the pace of open course sharing. Ultimately it will mean more work down the road to untangle faculty course materials from MH content that is not licensed for open sharing.
Open educational resources is an efficiency we all need. It allows us to build on and improve the existing content, rather than spending resources reinventing the wheel. Beware of “free” content that limits your ability to share openly.
Here, here. While much publisher content is very useful, by its very nature it’s not sharable. MH has partnered with Blackboard, resulting in locked-down courses and course content that make it difficult for different users to collaborate across classes and systems.
The trick here is to demonstrate to faculty and to college IT departments the benefits of shared, ‘plug and play’ curriculum and LMSs.
I look forward to the day when colleges and the state system decide to move away from expensive proprietary systems toward open-sourced and less expensive ways to offer content and collaborate.
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