The company, says CEO and co-founder Andrew Grauer, has invested “meaningfully” in building faculty support, funding fellowships with the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for Teaching and incentivizing faculty members to participate in the content-sharing network alongside their students. The shift has not been entirely coincidental, at least in Course Hero's case. The copyright and cheating concerns have not disappeared, and less than a year ago faculty members at Purdue University objected to a partnership between the institution's well-regarded Online Writing Lab and Chegg, citing cheating concerns.īut the supportive views like those expressed by UCLA's Johnson seem to comfortably coexist alongside the lingering concerns. "This may become the ‘study group’ of the 21st century." "Imagine business students at Stanford, Marist, University of Beijing and University of Paris connecting up outside of their courses to study together and maybe even work on team projects," the instructor said back then. (One 2009 article in Inside Higher Ed, entitled "Course Hero or Course Villain," featured numerous professors bemoaning the appearance of their copyrighted course materials on such quiz- and homework-sharing sites and others describing the portals as "really fertile ground for plagiarism and dishonesty.")īut that very same article also quoted a longtime adjunct instructor acknowledging the potential power of a learning-based social networking site. She is not only one of the 30,000 faculty participants in Course Hero's instructor portal (the " faculty club"), but she also enthusiastically attends the company's annual educator conference and has had her teaching profiled on the company’s website.Ī decade ago, Inside Higher Ed and other publications were filled with headlines on faculty concerns about students' use of sites like Course Hero for sharing course materials.
Johnson says Course Hero has helped her embrace that change.
If I don’t embrace this new way that students are learning, I’m doing them a disservice. She adds, "The tools have changed the scene has changed. They use YouTube they learn through sharing." "Just as I realized it wasn't realistic for me to say, 'No laptops in class anymore,' it's clear that students don't use the encyclopedia anymore. "But I am open enough to see that the students are not in that place anymore - that’s not who they are. Today's students, she says, aren't like she was - someone who got an opportunity to be educated in "the most traditional ways" (in-person, often in small classes), and had "great experiences … that were one of the major things that shaped me." But as someone who, now at 47 years of age, describes herself as "old school," "I still viewed it pretty antagonistically."Īs time passed, though, Johnson's view shifted. As a then-junior professor in African American studies, Johnson hadn't copyrighted the material, so she didn't share the concerns many instructors have historically had about sites like Chegg, Quizlet and Course Hero. "We were already in the digital age, but it still felt like cheating to me," says Johnson. As an early-career faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles, she discovered that some of her students were uploading her study guides and tests to the sharing website, without permission, and that other students were using those materials.
Gaye Theresa Johnson's initial experience with Course Hero nearly a decade ago was not a positive one. And please follow us on Twitter ihelearning.
#Hero lab online status free#
If you'd like to receive the free "Transforming Teaching and Learning" newsletter, please sign up here. Please share your ideas here for issues to examine, hard questions to ask and experiments - successes and failures - to highlight. Welcome to this week's edition of "Transforming Teaching and Learning," a column that explores how colleges and professors are reimagining how they teach and how students learn.
0 kommentar(er)
