Dive Brief:

• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the universities that seem to have figured out how to assign intellectual property rights for massive open online courses when faculty members move.
• At issue is the MOOC coursework that faculty members take with them when they join a new university, especially after their previous employer has spent six-figure sums of money and hundreds of hours of staff time on developing the course.
• MIT plans to introduce its policy interpretation for MOOC intellectual property in the coming months, and the interpretation will be revisited in one year, according to Inside Higher Ed. 

Dive Insight:

This is a thorny question that we’ll see more of as the MOOC universe grows. MIT allows faculty members to decide when and how to disseminate teaching materials, and their form. But the school has an exception for intellectual property created with significant funding or facilities from MIT. So faculty members who create MOOCs with significant MIT resources can teach those MOOCs when they leave, but MIT keeps the course materials and a license to continue the MOOC with those materials. Harvard University, Princeton University, and Duke University have also come up with policies to address the MOOC moving dilemma.