Hero or foe?

For many, Sparknotes.com and Pinkmonkey.com can be a blessing and a curse. While the sites offer summarized versions of extremely long books, what the student ends up with is a paltry tasting of what otherwise would’ve been a really interesting read. It has reduced the student from an appreciator of books, to a quick skimmer. It’s like eating the buns off a hamburger and not getting to the meat.
But then, there are sites like Coursehero.com, which takes a different angle. Coursehero.com doesn’t offer the answers to next week’s biology quiz, nor does it give you an essay to hand in for your English literature class. Instead, it works on the idea that students are entitled to work that has been done in the past so that it can help them study the material better. According to the Web site, Coursehero.com provides “open educational resources” for any student user to view. It is a “give and get” model, so you can only start to view other resources once you have uploaded five quality documents.
At first glance, everything about Coursrehero.com looks, well, illegal. The front page features a forum type listing of popular course materials. Words like “quizzes and answers”, litter themselves all over the website. The site’s interface doesn’t garner the attention and admiration for its simplicity and intuitive design, but rather, the first thing you notice is the amount of resources it offers.
When a site boasts a large student community and openly shared educational resources, there’s bound to be the accusation of plagiarism and cheating. Founder Andrew Grauer of Cornell addressed this question in an issue from Cornell’s student newspaper, “Cornell Daily Sun”. Grauer said, “We don’t want to promote cheating. We’re not going to be naïve about it”.
Regardless, the site’s traffic has sky rocketed in the past months, with many users on Facebook becoming members of the group. This has been reflected in the site’s layout, as advertisers have begun to pop up on the page, which suggests that Grauer is onto something big here.
The site is still relatively young, yet opposition continues to mount against it. Professors and lecturers have begun to rally against the site, claiming that their copyrighted materials were being posted without their consent. Lectures and notes from professors are technically copyrighted material; therefore, a random student posting the notes onto the site is in direct violation of the professor’s work.
This is the stigma that Coursehero.com has to address. When does openly sharing notes become an infringement on a professor’s hard work? Could Coursehero.com be another Sparknotes, where the student is given access to easy solutions to problems, which could’ve been solved after some hard work?
Time will tell if the site will survive all the criticism but until then, you can expect to see more students using Coursehero.com freely.