.EDU OR .COM?
Linking Learning to On-line Lecture Notes.
By Bill Kirtz
Why go to class? Several ambitious on-line companies
give new life to this eternal student question by posting free lecture
notes on Internet sites. The practice has prompted lawsuits and raised
hackles at other universities. Some faculty wonder whether these notes
might infringe on their rights or decimate class attendance. At Northeastern,
though, professors and students alike downplay the danger. Teachers here
insist they're more than roboprofs. They say any instructor worth her stipend
sparks discussion the sharpest stenographer can't replicate. And N.U. students
considering whether to pluck lectures off the Web say they'd use them to
supplement, not replace, classroom attendance.
Web services like NotesU.com, LectureNotes.net,
and Study24-7.com cloak their offerings in flowery rhetoric. Study24-7,
which says it's the first on-line note site and advertises itself as the
"fastest-growing student community," claims its notes "encourage
and help foster studying and communication amongst classmates."
This Santa Clara, California, enterprise promises
A students up to $1,000 a course for posting their notes. Study24-7's spokeswoman,
Blanca Langer, says the service interviews prospective note-takers over
the phone, reviews their notes and grade point average, and pays them from
revenues generated from advertisements on its Web site. She acknowledges
that UCLA has served her company with a cease-and-desist order, but calls
paid note-taking "perfectly legal if they don't copy word for word,
if it's the student's interpretation of lecture notes."
Keeping to the intellectual high road, Langer
says Study24-7 "doesn't replace class. It facilitates the learning
experience."
Facilitating. Fostering communication amongst
classmates. Ornate verbiage can't mask an essential contradiction. Although
note-taking services boast accurate notes, to avoid copyright problems
they must dub them "original works of authorship" and not line-by-line,
graph-by-graph replication of a prof's presentation. But why would you
rely on "original authorship" to pass a midterm?
Go ask Study24-7, where the data vary with every
press release. The company variously claims operations at "more than
400" and "over 100" colleges. If its N.U. record is typical,
don't believe the hype. It claims to have "a few note-takers"
already on the N.U. campus but lists only two offerings-one a history course
not taught here.
The other course covered is "Comparative
Neurobiology." Instructor Jeanne Duffy, a recent N.U. PhD and current
sleep-studies research fellow at Harvard Medical School, calls the notes
"a little bit incomplete." She says, "They're a fairly reasonable
replication of the text" but don't capture the many diagrams she creates.
She notes that the chat room and discussion groups Study24-7 plugs as fostering
interaction are empty.
Although Langer says note-takers' identities are
confidential, it was easy to track down the neurobiology scribe from her
Study24-7 nickname. A middler psychology major, she says she's been taking
notes only since mid-October-though some other notes from the course appear
to have been culled from a previous section. She says she found Study24-7
through a Northeastern News advertisement and didn't need to submit her
GPA to be hired.
Just as well. Although our correspondent says
she's "doing OK" in this difficult course, Duffy says "she's
not the best student in the class by any means. She got a sixty-one on
the first exam, while many students got As and Bs." The student says
she's received $50 for one week's notes and has mentioned her service to
some of her thirty-two classmates, two of whom already tape-record Duffy's
lectures.
Two classmates, Vanessa Bezerra and Trinh Lam,
say they hadn't heard about Study24-7 but will now check it out. The service
"would be awesome," says Bezerra, a senior biology major, adding
that she'd use it to review her own notes, not to skip class. "I think
I take good notes and I don't like to rely on others. I'm always afraid
they won't get everything, and I've only missed one class." Lam, a
junior biology major, says she'll click on Study24-7 but figures that others'
notes would be more helpful in classes where "the professors speak
really quick."
Duffy has no problems with copyright, because
she doesn't feel the information she imparts is hers alone. Her boss, biology
department chairman Edward Jarroll, agrees. "I don't consider the
material I give as proprietary. It's a compilation of others' stuff."
Jarroll and others note that absentee note-taking,
especially in medical school, is nothing new. For decades, medical students
have paid classmates to copy complex anatomical data. Marilyn Cairns, associate
professor of cardiopulmonary sciences, recalls that the $15 to $25 she
paid for Boston University pathology course notes each term let her focus
on important slides during class.
She gives her N.U. students much of the same material
for free. She posts notes on Web sites she sets up for each course so that
students can download her PowerPoint presentations.
Cairns and other teachers here stress that they
use many sources outside the text, and that anecdotal information and class
discussion both boost grades and turn blackboard theory into operational
practice. "Anatomy and physiology is as information-based as history,
but I make students interact with other students," Cairns says. "Students
don't need me to learn where the muscles attach. They need me to develop
a method of learning so they can go beyond exams and use it in their clinical
practice."
She argues that "learning is more than fact.
If the student can get information and do very well in your classroom with
paid notes, you need to revise your goals and methods."
Still, Cairns has some problems with paid note-takers.
"You could be trying out the newest, most exciting material before
publication, and you wouldn't like to give that to profit-makers."
Stephen Nathanson has similar views. The philosophy
professor and director of N.U.'s Center for Effective University Teaching
says he'd "be really annoyed to find a detailed account of my lectures
on the Web. Even though I provided information as a service to my class,
it does seem an infringement on my rights for someone to make money on
it."
Management science professor Robert Millen thinks
students can use his notes any way they want. "It's the same thing
as taking notes for people with disabilities. Why not tape a class for
an evening student who can't make it one time?" He points out that
technological innovations are changing education. "If we do things
on the Web, and develop video and audio tapes, note-taking is just the
opening of the box. Technology is moving fast."
University counsel Vincent Lembo is trying to
keep up with it all. Informed that an Internet note-taker operates in one
N.U. classroom, he says he'll discuss the situation with administrators
at the University of Vermont, whose faculty has voted to bar paid note-takers
unless they get a professor's permission.
As the Vermont decision faces challenge on free
expression grounds, Lembo identifies three areas of concern. "The
most basic academic issue is that nobody judges the quality of the notes.
Material can be the intellectual property of the faculty member and copyrighted,
but I don't see a problem if a student is taking notes." Second, "is
this a commercial transaction? How is this different from buying Cliffs
Notes on classic texts, or book synopses? It's not an easy issue."
Most institutions would want to protect faculty, but proponents can argue
that this is the same as buying commercial summaries or exchanging notes.
Finally, says Lembo, "If it's a commercial
offering, like selling term papers, it could be a consumer protection issue.
A student could sue if he pays for notes, relies on them, and they're incomplete."
This very issue is being litigated in California, where state universities
have sued R.R. Lecture Notes for providing outdated or incomplete notes.
Whatever the policy N.U. devises, ambitious Web
site developers are sure to try to thwart it. So Cairns and others underscore
the need to handle paid note-takers the same way they deal with research
paper mills: design an original question or essay-something that makes
students synthesize, not simply regurgitate, material.
Even if some overworked professors can't manage
to do this, students face new perils in trying to substitute others' effort
for their own. University of California at Berkeley PhD candidate John
Barrie lies in wait. His new service, Plagiarism.org, checks term papers
against more than 800 million Internet documents.
Okay, so why not follow Rodney Dangerfield's academic
lead? As a self-made millionaire in Back to School returning to pick up
a diploma, he hired Kurt Vonnegut to write his term paper on-you guessed
it-Kurt Vonnegut.
Then again, even that might not work. After perusing
the author-written thesis, Dangerfield's English prof gave Rodney no respect,
telling him that he didn't know the first thing about Vonnegut.
Bill Kirtz
is an associate professor in the School of Journalism. His opinions appear
regularly in "Talk of the Gown."
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