That's ridiculous, I would say in terms of preparation and creation an online course is probably nearly double the time of a physical one at a minimum.
If you spend time editing together a pre-recorded video, it can easily triple the amount of work. Even if you go with the pro-style one take, you need to rehearse and have a good plan in place to make such a video.
Honestly it feels like it boils down to the assumption that students will keep paying the same amount of money for a degree with a world famous university's branding. It seems to really be that transactional for senior management.
“ Few reported cases exist addressing the issue of whether the educational institution or the faculty member owns the copyright to teaching materials prepared by a faculty member. All the reported cases that do exist have either held, or stated in dictum, that the copyright to the materials at issue in those cases belonged to the faculty member, at least in the absence of an explicit agreement to the contrary between the institution and the faculty member. Thus, cases have essentially followed the "teacher exception" to the work for hire rule.”
https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
This article gives a good introduction: Copyright ownership of e-learning and teaching materials: Policy approaches taken by UK universities https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-017-9583-4
I will say your view is very common among outsiders. I've heard it so many times from people that think I'm too dumb to notice something so obvious. Unfortunately lecture delivery just isn't a big part of the cost of teaching, and the online format only helps if you phone it in by never changing anything. If you do change something, you have the massive expense of recording the whole lecture all over again.
Absolutely true.
> Lectures have to change over time, both because you can do better with practice and because the material and real world change.
This is obviously going to be true for vocation-focused classes, but am I wrong in thinking that this is going to vary from field to field? Once you nail down your Math 101 lectures, do you really need to change them?
Also, this is not a real argument, but I have seen universities where lectures were given by a professor, and Q&A office hours were provided by a TA. I imagine that some universities are thinking that they can have a professor write a lesson plan and record lectures, and then the class can be run in perpetuity by a team of grad students. (Cue laugh track.)
This is one of the cases where you could (assuming the students don't change much). I teach macroeconomics. So far in my career some of the bigger events have included the bursting of the 90s tech bubble, 9/11, the Great Recession/financial crisis, the Greek debt crisis, Brexit, the election of Trump, and the pandemic. When I started teaching 20 years ago, the profession had settled on talking about managing long-term economic growth and viewed business cycles as being of secondary importance.