The University of Washington Student Newspaper
Monday, October 11, 1999

Recent Issues
10/8/99
10/7/99
10/6/99
10/5/99
Older issues

Campus Calendar

Seattle Book Signings

What do you think of this story? Voice your opinion and give us FeedBack

Write a letter to the editor

Apply to
Work at The Daily

Submit a story idea

    The UW and colleges across the nation are struggling to respond to a new presence in the classroom: Paid student note-takers who sell their notes to companies like Allstudents.com, often without the permission of the instructor.

    Teachers aren't happy.

    "The fact that somebody is publishing notes [from] my class without telling me disturbs me...I think courtesy would say you talk to the professor," said Senior Lecturer Paul Heynes, who only discovered notes were online for his Introduction to Microeconomics class when contacted for comment on this story.

    Professor Christine Di Stefano, who also learned secondhand that Allstudents.com and another company, Versity.com, will be offering notes on her Introduction to Political Theory class, said she was angered that an outside group was trying to profit from her work.

    "When I put a course together a lot of work goes into it, a lot of time. It has a professor's personal stamp," she said.

    Ideally, Allstudents.com tries to seek out and discuss the note-taking operation with every professor whose class they are covering, explained founding member Troy Hartzell.

    However, the company only just entered into the field, and is trying to get note-taking operations set up on over 50 campuses during the next few weeks, he said.

    "If [professors] have a problem they should come to us so we can address it, because we don't want to step on any toes", Hartzell said, but admitted Allstudents isn't calling up every professor before they OK a note taker right now.

    This may get Allstudents in some legal hot water. According to Vice Provost Steve Olswang, a teacher traditionally has copyright over their lectures, giving them the right to sue if these lectures are reproduced for profit without their expressed permission. The office of the provost has not currently received any complaints from faculty about this issue, he said, but is watching the issue play itself out at other campuses like Duke and UCLA with great interest.

    Naturally online companies have a different outlook.

    According to Hartzell, what his company offers isn't transcripts of the professor's lecture notes, but "an interpretation of what went on in lecture." Because Allstudents does not, and does not claim to, offer the official notes for the class, they are exempt from copyright laws, Hartzell believes.

    However, Hartzell hopes to be able to establish better communications with professors as the quarter progresses and Allstudents' program becomes more established.

    He added that he envisions a cooperative effort between the professor and the company to offer students the best possible resources.

     "There's a real big difference between 'dot-com' and 'dot-edu'" Hartzell said, explaining how budget and personnel constraints keep college Web sites from providing the kind of online notes and associated links, information, and services Allstudents provides.
    But an issue that seems to be entirely overlooked by Allstudents in their focus on notes - however appendage and improved - is the condemnation of many liberal arts faculty for any variety of lecture notes.

    The professors' complaints strike a recurring theme:

    Even at their best, notes just aren't enough.

    Both Di Stefano and Heynes formerly participated in ASUW Lecture Notes, the student government's note-taking service, but stopped after becoming convinced it was harming the class as a whole.

    Lecture notes tend to be of poor quality, and written from a limited perspective, Di Stefano said.

    She went through a skew of note-takers from the ASUW, but found that none of them, including graduate students, had an adequate mastery of political science to be trusted as the class note-taker. She questioned whether an Internet company hiring note-takers it has never met can do much better then the ASUW (see sidebar for more on the quality of online notes).

    In addition, Heynes said, lecture notes aren't very well attuned to the way he teaches his class. The only way to deal with the complex ideas his class covers is through a series of active in-class discussions, which doesn't give a note-taker much to cover. Each student can easily jot down what they need to remember the material; but the learning is based on the in-class experience, rather than the facts he is presenting.

    The problem with lecture notes lies in the fact that notes are extremely personalized, Di Stefano said, describing how each student captures a different aspect of the lecture. This is fine in a regular class, where differing opinions can arise in discussion to the benefit of everyone.

    However, Di Stefano worries that when one student is elevated to the position of note-taker, his opinion may be viewed as more valuable than any other, limiting the intellectual bandwidth of the discussion.

    Worse, when notes are available, many students use them as a replacement for doing any work of their own, ending in a limited understanding of the material and very poor grades, said Di Stefano.

    "Students who rely on notes and don't do reading or take their own notes will be lucky, lucky to get even a 2.0," she said, explaining the concept-based nature of this class requires interaction and discussion.

    Others beg to differ though.

    Michael Krasmen, vice president of product development for Versity.com, one of Allstudents.com's competitors, argues that online sites like Versity and Allstudents provide an excellent addition to one's own notes, providing a review and a contrast to what the students themselves wrote down.

    In addition, the services offer a lot more then notes. For every class, Versity provides background information, links and support, maintained by a staff of graduate students, who can answer most questions students might have.

    Allstudents offers other features too, including similar links and background, and an online day-timer linked to the notes, which can send reminders about upcoming tests and papers, said Hartzell.

    Krasmen stressed the connectivity allowed by an online site devoted to academic needs of students across the country.

    Because Versity has a presence on 88 campuses and in 3,500 classes, it offers notes for many different versions of the same class available at the click of a mouse. Using Versity's instant messaging capabilities, students can contact others in the same classes or the same majors - but on different campuses - to work together or seek advice.

    "By clicking up to other students [across the country] you are leveraging the intellectual capital students have," he said.

    "The value of this site is not from the individual colleges, but from the academic communities we are forming.".



Next article

Copyright©1999 The Daily University of Washington