How can I protect a course I created independently from being taken by the community college I substitute for, when I am about to teach it there? I have created a course independent of the community college I substitute for. I contacted the CE department about a year ago to see if my course would be something I could offer as a CE course at the college. They were excited and after several meetings my course is scheduled to begin this fall.
However, there have been a few red flags that have me concerned that maybe the college will try to take my course and teach it without me being the instructor. No compensation for all the hours creating the course has been paid. Besides substituting for one of the technical programs, I am not currently a paid staff member. They did not ask me to create the course for the college, I came to the department with the course already created.
I guess my question is: how do I ensure they don’t take the curriculum as property of the college if something goes sideways?
I'm going to come up with a different answer.
Sometimes I've taken over a course from someone else. They've offered me their slides, exercises, questions, etc.
Sometimes I've stopped teaching a class, and I've offered my successor my slides, exercises, questions, etc.
I haven't been able to use anyone else's material, and I'm pretty sure no one has used mine. It's not much use - unless it actually tells you what to say, when I write a slide, I have some idea what I was going to say. No one else does, and they can often fail to make much sense of it.
They can't steal your course, your course is in your head.
(My favorite example of this was when we were giving a talk to prospective students. I usually did this course for our department, but on one occasion, a colleague did it instead. The colleague took my slides, and figured that these were going to be slides that introduced the department. What could they possibly say? I was told later by someone else who was there that there was a slide with a picture of my cat. My colleague said &quot;And this slide has a picture of Jeremy's cat. I've no idea why.&quot;  [I'm sure that it was there for a good reason, or to make a point, but I completely forget what that point was.])