Berkeley: Where the Online Fun Never Stops!
Berkeley's online ethics quiz, mandated for faculty because of administrators' malfeasance, has now been joined by a couple of other online quizzes, similarly assigned to faculty because administrators fucked up.
Faculty wonder about the logic of this.
'A number of campus researchers received an e-mail yesterday announcing the beginning of an online course designed to educate them about conflicts of interest that can arise in research.
The course is the third in a series of new online programs aimed at streamlining university policy on ethical dilemmas. The programs were developed as part of a response to university and state audit findings after the executive compensation problems uncovered in 2005.
After rolling out an online training program on conflicts of interest for high-level management officials and an ethics briefing required of all university employees, the briefing on research conflicts of interest is aimed at making UC policy explicit and accessible to faculty, said Patrick Schlesinger, the director of research compliance in the UC Office of the President.
Like the ethics training, campus officials said the new conflict of interest briefing will likely face some criticism as a program that was developed in response to high-level policy breaches but is aimed at lower-level employees or faculty members.
“It is a little bit annoying that the systemwide seems to muck up on their ethics and then we’re the ones that take the course,” said UC Berkeley chemistry professor Richard Mathies, who chairs the campus conflict of interest committee.
Mathies, who said he is generally in support of a faculty training program, pointed out that no one from the campus committee was consulted in the formation of the briefing.
... Mathies said there is currently no mandatory training for researchers at UC Berkeley. However, he said the universal training may pose problems.
“There’s no question that we need to take these things seriously,” he said. “I am concerned, however, that if you present a very naive Web-based course it tends to trivialize the issues and generates an environment of lack of respect.”
Schlesinger said there is currently no policy for those refusing to complete the online courses, but he added that the design is meant to make training easy for faculty.'
--the daily californian--
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