Students found content in a USyd Open Learning Environment (OLE) unit to have shared teaching materials that appeared verbatim on another site. The unit, OLET1309, is aimed at teaching students how to write simple scripts using JavaScript.
In a slide titled “JavaScript DOM – EventListener”, a series of lines of text from the W3Schools website has been included as a dot-point list.
The slide has since been updated to provide a reference for this material. A student in the course has shown Honi a picture of the slide before and after it was updated. Before the update, there was no reference to W3Schools, instead it only referred to a Mozilla link.
W3Schools is a free online learning website, which provides guides in various coding languages including JavaScript. As a two credit point OLE, students are paying hundreds for content that was freely available on the internet.
A student in the course explained to Honi that this issue had not been directly addressed either on Ed Discussion or via email, and that the only change was the additional credit on the page for W3Schools.
A University of Sydney spokesperson told Honi that “We are committed to ensuring all of our course materials meet copyright rules and regulations and satisfying any attribution requirements. The content was inherited from a previous coordinator, and is now being removed.”
This issue was raised in a post made in the course forum, but the post was removed shortly after.
