I also find it disappointing that the statement in the Learner’s Bill of Rights about the ownership of student work – “Students also have the right to create and own intellectual property and data associated with their participation in online courses” – echoes the limited way that the terms for Facebook and other services are often discussed. That is, the issue of the user’s “ownership of content” is noted without considering how, in a digitally networked environment, the ownership of content is largely the right to assign (or negotiate) licenses to it.

We’ve come to expect and (more-or-less accept) such licenses from commercial services but I expect something different in an educational environment.

Using Coursera, for example, means giving the company “a fully transferable, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to use, distribute, sublicense, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display” your “user content.” The user content includes things like term papers, homework assignments, etc.

Imagine if your brick-and-mortar university claimed a license like this on everything a student turned in for a class. More to the point, imagine that the company that owned the building in which the class was held claimed the license. If one of the universities involved with Coursera needed to lease some classrooms would you expect it to agree to let the building owner impose these conditions on their students?

Of course, an online service needs some type of license to user content in order to operate. You can’t even have a simple threaded discussion if you’re not storing the comments on the server. But does the license really need to be “perpetual” and “fully transferable”? Wouldn’t a license that expires two weeks after the end of the course be sufficient? Or, to give the platform some breathing room, two years after the end of the course?

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6