Social Studying
Description
By Marc Parry and Jeffrey R. Young:
"OpenStudy, a social-learning site that started as a project of Emory University and Georgia Tech. It opened to the public in September.
Many of the social-learning sites are, like OpenStudy, for-profit companies—or at least they aspire to be once their services take off. And some of their business plans rely on a controversial practice: paying students for their notes.
The big question facing all of these sites—a group that includes Mixable, from Purdue University, and GradeGuru, from McGraw-Hill—is whether students are really interested in social learning online. Another quandary: If students profit from selling their notes, are they infringing on a college's or a professor's copyright? And while the sites are not part of the seamy world of exam or term-paper vendors, what happens if some users post answers to tests?
One service has already failed to mix Facebook with studies. In 2008 a company called Inigral closed its Facebook "Courses" application, which had allowed students to view who was in their classes, start discussions, and get notified of assignments. "We found that Facebook was not a popular place to engage with course content," says Michael Staton, Inigral's chief executive. Students preferred using it for things like looking at friends' photos.
Many students, in fact, prefer sticking to their own notes on courses, rather than trusting friends. Focus groups conducted on behalf of GradeGuru, a note-sharing site, found that many undergraduates don't see much value in passing their notes to others or consulting the jottings of their classmates.
"Studying is still largely an independent endeavor," says Jonathan D. Becker, an assistant professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, who led the recent focus groups as a consultant to GradeGuru. "College students study in groups to some degree, but from what students say they don't find them terribly beneficial."
Note sharing online also raises the tricky legal question of whether students have the right to sell ideas presented in a professor's lecture. California State University officials recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to NoteUtopia, a note-sharing site based in San Francisco, citing an unusual state law that bars the distribution of lecture information, including "handwritten or typewritten class notes," for a profit.
The practice could even violate federal copyright law, though whether it does or not is unclear, even to copyright experts. The answer may depend on whether a professor reads verbatim from prepared notes (in which case the professor or university might be found to own the rights to the material) or whether the class is a spontaneous discussion (in which case no single participant owns the content), according to Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University's Law School.
Despite those concerns, more than a dozen sites are racing to sign up users for their social-studying services." (http://chronicle.com/article/New-Social-Software-Tries-to/125542/)
Examples
- FinalsCLub
- GradeGuru
- Open Study