Faculty Intellectual Property Satement

On Tuesday, May 27, 2025, Provost Colin Potts issued a statement on faculty intellectual property rights and the expectations of those rights. Below is the content of that email.

Office of the Provost Email Header

Dear Faculty Colleagues,

At Missouri S&T, we value the intellectual contributions of our faculty, whether in research or teaching. As an academic institution, it is essential that we uphold and respect the intellectual property (IP) rights of our faculty. The educational materials faculty members develop—whether housed in Canvas or created elsewhere—are their intellectual property, just as their research outputs are.

To ensure clarity and consistency across campus, I am formally codifying the following expectations for Missouri S&T:

  1. Ownership of Educational Materials: Course materials created by a faculty member, including those developed within Canvas or any other platform, remain the intellectual property of that faculty member.

  2. Access and Use of Course Content: No individual should be added to a Canvas course or have content copied from a course without the explicit consent of the faculty member who owns the material. In exceptional cases, a department chair may grant such approval.

  3. Roles and FERPA Compliance: For registrar courses, only individuals specified by the department should be added to a course in the role of “Instructor”, to protect students’ FERPA rights. Peer reviewers and support personnel should be added with the Canvas role of “Observer”. Instructional designers assisting with the course should be added with the Canvas role of “Designer”.

  4. IP Agreements for Online Course Development: Before the university commits time or resources to developing an online version of a course, the involved instructor(s) must first sign an IP agreement with the university.

These principles are foundational to maintaining academic integrity, protecting the rights of our faculty, and ensuring appropriate stewardship of university resources.


Thank you for your attention to this matter and for helping to uphold these standards. I appreciate your commitment to these shared values.

Colin

Colin Potts, Ph.D.
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
Professor, Computer Science
colin.potts@mst.edu, (573) 341-4138
102 Parker Hall, 300 W. 13th Street, Rolla, MO 65409
https://provost.mst.edu