How to resolve course issues when a resource is pulled for plagiarism?

Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament: John has been pulled from the store "due to plagiarism issues."

This affects at least three Mobile Ed courses which link to that resource, one of which makes heavy use of it (40 links, third most-linked resource). For that particular course, those links represent 6% of its readings.

This is not the first time that this situation has occurred, where (existing/future) customers are left with a course which is now missing content, yet is still sold at its old regular price.

While I do realize that we have not lost any portion of the video presentation, a course's readings do make up a substantial educational portion of the course.

I have always felt that Mobile Ed courses offer great value, but hate to see a course's value diminish due to unfortunate issues such as plagiarism. Will FL have any plans to address/resolve this issue of customers not being able to read what the instructor had originally linked to, as part of the course material?

Thanks for any consideration!

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Comments

Mark Smith

You raise an important and difficult issue, as you know. It might help to let others know which courses you've found are affected.

The right course of events would be to stop selling those courses immediately (or provide notification of the problems they are aware of), revise the course content to use resources that can currently be obtained, and then release new course material to those who already own the courses, and re-offer the courses for sale.

In the specific case mentioned, it might be possible to find relevant discussions in Carson's Pillar commentary as suitable replacements. I don't have the courses you must be thinking about, so don't know how feasible that would be.

FL should definitely not ignore the MEd situation now that it is fully aware of the situation with the commentary.

What a sad state of affairs.

Miles Custis

The course that uses the Baker commentary 40 times is Ben Witherington's NT221 The Wisdom of John: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on Johannine Literature. I'm going to go ahead and replace the Baker links with links to Carson's Pillar commentary in this course. We are actually in the process of updating NT221 to include an Activities resource, so the timing works out as well as it can for this.

I'm happy to hear that you find the links to additional resources in Mobile Ed courses to be so valuable. I think they are a great value as well, but they can occasionally be a source of frustration (both for us and for customers) when a publisher makes a decision to stop selling a book. Resources can and have been retired/pulled for a variety of reasons (plagiarism, the publisher released a new edition, etc.). We may not be able to update every link to a retired resource in every Mobile Ed course, but we'll do our best to keep them pointing to resources that continue to be available, especially when a course makes heavy use of a resource that is no longer available.

scooter

I'm going to go ahead and replace the Baker links with links to Carson's Pillar commentary in this course.

Miles, does the author of the course pick which resources get linked to, when the course is originally made, or does FL choose?

Who says Carson links are the right ones here? Do you ''reask'' the course author?

Miles Custis

Miles, does the author of the course pick which resources get linked to, when the course is originally made, or does FL choose?

Who says Carson links are the right ones here? Do you ''reask'' the course author?

We ask our speakers provide a bibliography, but ultimately the reading links are added by the Mobile Ed Contributing Editors. We prioritize books by the speaker that relate to the course first and other books that the speaker recommends in their bibliography second.

In this case, Carson's commentary is a good choice to replace the Baker links because it was the book that was used "without sufficient attribution" in the Baker commentary according to Baker Academic's statement. See this thread for more information and a link to Baker's statement: https://community.logos.com/forums/t/153088.aspx.

Rich DeRuiter

In this case, Carson's commentary is a good choice to replace the Baker links...

Carson's commentary on John is absolutely excellent. I don't have the mobile ed course, but I'm preaching through John and have found his and Morris's (NICNT) to be the most helpful.

Jan Krohn

But then, some users might own the previous resources that have been pulled, and not the new ones. So updating the bibliography would render the course less useful/usable to them.

So this is not as easy and straightforward as it seems on the first sight.