Fresh out of college more years ago than I care to reveal, I was being considered for my first real job as a teacher of mathematics in a small rural secondary school in Missouri. The job would be a godsend: I was broke, a subject of great interest to my local draft board, and in need of some practical experience before embarking upon graduate school. All of these problems would be solved if I could just land this job, but there was a major hitch. Although I had taken the requisite mathematics courses to teach, not a single education course graced my transcript. There was no chance I could satisfy the Missouri teacher-certification requirements.

The interview with the superintendent of the local school district - who was faced with teaching the math courses himself if he did not find an instructor - went well, and he agreed to hire me as a sort of permanent-substitute teacher if I would begin work immediately on certification requirements. I eagerly agreed and soon found myself both teacher and student. By day I taught algebra, geometry, and trigonometry to my high-school students; nights and weekends I studied educational psychology and the history of American education by correspondence. Instead of attending a college classroom, an impossibility from my isolated locale on the Missouri plains, I read the texts at my own pace, composed answers to assigned questions, wrote papers, and corresponded by mail with my professors at the University of Missouri.

Distance study worked for me, a motivated student, but it was certainly less than optimal. The social aspect, the direct connection with professor and peers, was missed: no engaging dialogues, no clashes of viewpoint, and no sense of community with students pursuing similar goals. It was a lonely experience, a likely reason that correspondence study never realized great success, despite a huge potential student population.

How different would my experience have been if I could have traded the U.S. mail for today's Internet technology? Some would say it would be the same. After all, it's hard to go out for a beer after class with your online professor and classmates. But an increasing number of major universities claim that the ability to interact online in real time, to use streaming-video technology to bring lectures to the desktop, and to develop virtual communities of online scholars will finally bring distance learning to fruition. Their view is that no corner of the earth will be too remote to be included in the classroom. The result has been an explosion of online courses over the past few years, and even online degree programs.

A typical case is the State University of New York. Five years ago, it had 19 online students; today, the number is more than 20,000, and SUNY hopes to be a major supplier of Internet courses to the U.S. military.

This emergence of online courses may be good for students in remote areas, but it has raised new issues in the academic community regarding the traditional role of a university professor and the ownership of course content. Unlike the correspondence-course paradigm, where a student read a text and then answered questions, wrote papers, and took one or more written examinations, today's Internet technology allows for the actual delivery of a professor's lecture to a large number of distant students on multiple occasions. Is this a form of publication? If so, then who should own the copyright to the lecture material and thereby profit from its use?

Historically, university professors have maintained complete control over original lecture materials and have been free to write and profit from textbooks, lectures, and articles that incorporated such material. However, with the advent of Internet technology and the growth of online courses, universities are increasingly eyeing course content as a valuable commodity. Some are insisting on the right to market lecture content, in some cases through for-profit companies that have been spun off from the university or through agreements with companies specifically created by independent business interests to sell online courses.

One example of the latter is UNext.com, an Internet-learning company that currently has alliances with the Columbia University Business School, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Carnegie Mellon University. Its Web site states that their academic collaborators "work closely with UNext.com to capture their knowledge in an online environment." Using this strategy, they have created Cardean University, which sells business courses in the commercial marketplace.

New York University's (NYU) School of Continuing and Professional Studies (SCPS) is also seeking to use the Internet to market its courses. Already the largest provider of continuing-education courses in the country, it has established the Virtual College, which currently offers 120 courses and both bachelor's- and master's-degree programs. Over the next two years, it plans to increase its course offerings to 400. The content of the courses offered through the Virtual College is drawn from the course content offered in its traditional, campus-based courses. "An effective online course requires an effective on-site course," said Robert Manuel, chief information and technology officer of SCPS. Manuel went on to say that his job is to take an effective on-site course and devise the technical solutions to offer a similar experience through an online format. The Virtual College aims to be a global university and will have satellite sites based in Hong Kong, London, Spain, and Buenos Aires.

The NYU Virtual College insists on owning the rights to the course content, but it also recognizes the intellectual-property rights of a professor's original lecture materials. Such material is licensed for a specific period of time for a specific use. Faculty members continue to own the content they contribute to the course and are thus free to use it in other venues, such as textbooks or lectures, noted Manuel.

NYU has also created a totally separate, for-profit company, NYUonline,which provides non-credit educational programs to the business community. NYUonline includes live instructor-led lectures as a feature of its Internet classes. The company also offers certificate programs, with the first, a certificate in management techniques, initiated in February 2000. Future programs offered will be in marketing, foreign languages, public relations, health care, law, and real estate. Plans are also in the works to offer a master's of science in management and systems. These courses and programs will be developed in collaboration with NYU faculty members and will also be an extension of successful on-site courses.

Recognizing that the emergence of online course offerings raises many new questions and opportunities for university faculty, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), through its Special Committee on Distance Education and Intellectual Property Issues, has provided some guidelines. A number of pertinent questions are addressed: What is intellectual property and who owns it? Who may use intellectual property? How should funds derived from such property be distributed? How are emerging issues and disputes over such issues resolved?

Some universities consider the intellectual work of professors as "works made for hire" and therefore the rightful property of the university. But in the May/June 1998 issue of Academe, Robert A. Gorman, former president of the AAUP and Kenneth W. Gemmill, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, note that such a position "profoundly contradicts the assumptions and practices of the academic community. . . . Almost all of the few court decisions handed down on this matter clearly state that . . . faculty authors own copyright in their works." And in her July 2000 testimony before the Web-Based Education Commission established by the U.S. Congress, AAUP general secretary Mary Burgan restated the association's position in support of the "prevailing academic practice to treat the faculty member as the copyright owner of works that are created independently and at the faculty member's own initiative for traditional academic purposes." An academic contemplating offering an online course or entering into a contract with an Internet-learning company would do well to consult both the AAUP guidelines and Gorman's article.

So what does the future hold for online courses? David F. Noble of York University has written extensively on the subject and refers to online courses as "digital diploma mills." Noble takes the position that the new online courses are simply an extension of the old correspondence-course paradigm in an attempt to capitalize on the market for distance learning. "The common denominator linking the two episodes is . . . the pursuit of profit in the guise and name of higher education," writes Noble. Once one gets past the dazzle of the new technologies, Noble thinks the current online craze will end up being a dud, just as correspondence study was a dud. In the meantime, however, Noble predicts that "the commoditization of instruction [will] lead invariably to the 'proletarianization' or, more politely, the 'deprofessionalization' of the professorate."