Sharing Course Material With Other Lecturers I just received an email from a lecturer I do not know and have never had contact with, asking for my course materials.
On the one hand, sharing my course materials has almost no cost for me, and I have shared them before either &quot;in house&quot; (with lecturers in my department) or with close colleagues (coauthors/community friends etc.). This is the first time I'm encountering a request from a truly random stranger.
I am inclined to refuse this request.
I put in a lot of effort into my course material, and take pride in my work. Handing it over to some other person (who may or may not credit me) feels like I'm cheapening my efforts.
I am I just being prudish? Is this common practice that I just never happened to encounter? Is there a potential ethical issue with sharing materials that I am missing here?
Whether to share-or-not (assuming that you yourself, not your university, own the rights to what you've created) is strongly a matter of personal preference... I don't see a universal mandate.
Many years ago, I did pay careful attention to copyright control, and so on, but eventually I got the impression that it was simply not the case that people were clamoring to get their hands on stuff I'd written. :)
So, for some years now, I've put everything on-line with a Creative Commons license, and whenever anyone is polite enough to ask permission for use, I give it, without any negotiations. In fact, if one of my goals were to maximize the impact I have on ... for example, graduate curriculum in mathematics... unrestricted dissemination seems the obvious choice. True, I may not &quot;get all the credit I deserve&quot;, but I already have &quot;enough credit&quot; to survive, so that'd not be a tragedy.
A situation where one should be more careful is when one's institution attempts to use-and-discard people who develop course material. In such cases, &quot;getting credit&quot; probably matters much more. Luckily, till now anyway, that kind of thing has not been toooooo much of an issue at my university, although arising sporadically over the years. (I'm not optimistic about the future...)
In summary: if you don't want to share the fruits of your labors, don't. You may change your mind later, and that's fine, too.