Course development: can I pay someone to make slides for the course? I am asked to start from scratch and develop a new under-graduate course this fall. I still have about 2.5 months left but since there are tons of research commitments ahead, I am basically a bit unpositive on whether I can get all the course development task done before that.. The central hurdle is to make slides for about 12 weeks' teaching load.  

I am writing to inquire some conventions on course development. In particular, can I pay someone to make slides in my situation? If so, then:


do I need to acknowledge certain authorship for such cases?
where should I find such services?
Theoretically you can, but practically I doubt you will find someone qualified who is willing to do it for a reasonable price. Designing a course is hard work and pretty individualized. Look at how many different ways there are to teach the same course. Everyone does it differently and I hate teaching to someone else's syllabus and cannot image using someone else's unaltered slides.

As for acknowledging the author, you probably need to let your department know that you have outsourced this aspect of your job. You will need to make sure that the material is appropriately licensed so that you and the department can use it as needed.

As for telling students, I believe there is a fair amount of leeway regarding the reuse of material. Specifically, for many courses, you are not presenting "original ideas" so it is not plagiarism in my opinion. That said, when possible, redirecting students to the original source can be helpful.