Thursday, September 09, 1999
College lecture notes free online
The New York Times
Students at Ohio State, the University of Kentucky and Indiana University take heart: you may never again have to take notes in a lecture again, nor will your counterparts on 59 other large campuses across the country.
An upstart Internet venture called StudentU.com is hiring students this semester at 62 universities and paying them to take notes in as many as 50 core courses per campus. The note takers post their jottings, within 24 hours, on a central Web site. Among the dozens of notes already listed are those taken Tuesday during John Syer's course on world politics at California State University in Sacramento and on Aug. 24th during Robert G. Schwebach's lecture on financial markets at Colorado State University.
The service, which first went online Wednesday, is free. And the stenographers, most of them hired through their fraternities and enrolled in the courses, are paid $300 a semester to open their notebooks to the world.
The creator of the site, Oran Wolf, a 27-year-old graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, who hopes to earn a profit partly through advertising, said he started the service to help students augment their own notes or to help them catch up after a sick day. But he conceded that his offerings could be abused by those with less legitimate excuses, like chronic oversleeping or lingering hangovers.
“I definitely don't believe students should skip class,” Mr. Wolf said Wednesday from his Houston office, as he admitted that he, on occasion, had done just that. “It is important for them to attend the class, use this information as supplements to the course and, if they do that, they are going to make A's.”
There is no shortage of critics who believe that the arrival of Mr. Wolf's venture — along with other Web sites that sell sample term papers and synopses of great books — signals nothing less than the erosion of liberal education, if not civilization.
But Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, one of the schools where Mr. Wolf has set up shop, believes that the problem lies more with universities — and their reliance, often for financial reasons, on 300-student lecture courses — than on those trying to beat the system.
“There's something sleazy about students taking notes and selling them on the Web,” Mr. Edmundson said. “But if you can buy the notes and satisfy the course requirements, maybe the course should have been distributed as a book, rather than having this charade of somebody standing up and going through a lecture that, for all purposes, doesn't change from year to year, and doesn't allow students the possibility of discussion.”
Peter Wood, a professor of anthropology and the associate provost at Boston University, which is also on Mr. Wolf's list, said the university might consider taking legal action once notes from the school appear on the site — which, as of Wednesday, they had not.
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