[deerpig]

This just makes me sad. When class material, which is supposed to be the antithesis of closed and proprietary is treated as property, then there is something very wrong with the educational system you are working in. Education is about spreading knowledge as far and wide as possible, not controlling it.

All of the course material we are developing for a new four year IT, information literacy and Big History program for a Cambodian university is licensed under a twin MIT/CC license for all media (there will be a lot of video), code and text and will be downloadable from GitHub. We hope this material can be used and adapted for use anywhere. We've done this to prevent anyone from trying to make make the material proprietary and ensure it stays free, not because we were worried about what students might do with it.

I had never heard of an "academic integrity agreement" before. I just googled it and found this:

  "Some schools have created an honor code -- a school-wide 
  agreement about ethical behavior -- that parents sign in 
  September and students sign each time they turn in an 
  assignment, quiz or exam."  
  -- https://www.edutopia.org/blog/academic-integrity-cheat-or-be-cheated-denise-pope

Sign a statement for every assignment, quiz or exam? WTF! An honor code that takes out the "honor" and replaces it with "legal" is no longer an honor code, it is a contract. This is the sign of a broken society.

To paraphrase Monty Python, "America is a silly place, let's not go there."

[bo1024]

I think you're misinterpreting the point of the parent post. The point isn't to prevent free flow of information, it's to prevent plagiarism. Usually, at least in computer science, course materials, lecture notes, and research papers are freely available on webpages. The other side of the coin from making information widely available is that proper attribution and credit becomes very important culturally. There's no good purpose to be served by copying and pasting something that's freely available when you can just link to it instead.

[robotresearcher]

Professors owning their own material is an ancient tradition. If they did not, they wouldn’t be able to MIT license it.