I’m asking the question. I’m not judging.
An enterprising graduate student from Kent State is using the Internet to bring buyers and sellers together. It’s a familiar story to most of us, and all part of a booming online economy that adds convenience and efficiency to our lives.
And there appears to be a real market for what Michael Matousek is selling: Notes from college lectures. Since the website went live, it’s handled more than 3,500 transactions, according to this post by Plain Dealer reporter Karen Farkas. Advertisers like the site, too.
FlashNotes.com was hatched in an entrepreneurship class in Kent State’s College of Business and came to life with the help the Youngstown Business Incubator. Viewed strictly as a business enterprise, it’s a winner. Students who submit notes earn 80% of the revenues those notes fetch. But the producers of content are paid only when it sells, thus there’s no up-front cost to the business.
Brilliant? Maybe. But Flashnotes raises some ethical dilemmas I just can’t shake. Maybe it’s my prudish nature 
On the one hand, the notes a student purchases are nothing more than a study aid. In some of my own classes, I post lecture notes online for easy download. And how different is FlashNotes from the practice of sharing one’s notes with classmates face to face? If you prefer, your could think of FlashNotes as a huge study group where the smart kids charge a fee for admission.
In the Plain Dealer piece, Matousek’s accounting instructor, Denise Easterling, put it this way:
“I have heard a lot of professors say, and I agree, that any tool that really helps a student in gaining a better grasp of the material and being able to translate that into a better classroom grade is a positive.”
She said some professors say students really need to be in a class so they do not miss out on learning.
“But so many of our students are working one or two part-time jobs or have children,” Easterling said. “They miss class for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with not wanting to be there. This is a tool that helps them stay on track.”
Yes, FlashNotes will almost certainly help students who miss the occasional class. But what of the slacker who never attends class? Or doesn’t have the ability to pass the class at all? Plenty of students are happy to exchange their “learning experience” for an easier path to a degree. I know this from 20+ years of observing the dynamic.
So here’s my question: Do businesses like FlashNotes shortchange the learning process and, in turn, might they undermine the mission of the university — even though it’s not their intent?
I told you it was an ethical dilemma — one with tenable arguments on both sides.
I wish all of my students showed the energy and the moxie of Matousek and his partner Dave Petruziello. But I’m wondering who will draw the line between information sharing and academic dishonesty. It’s an easy line to cross when all of the information you need is a mouse click away.
FlashNotes already posts lecture notes and study guides. Will that give way to research outlines or literature reviews? Will anyone police the system? I can only assume the guys at FlashNotes have had this discussion. We will tomorrow — in my Ethics class.
I’m reminded of the dust-up at Toronto’s Ryerson University back in ’08, recounted and analyzed in Clay Shirky’s brilliant book, “Cognitive Surplus.” It involved 18-year-old engineering student Christopher Avenir, who established a large Facebook study group that nearly got him kicked out of school.
The issues in these cases are parallel. Avenir’s study group of 145 students enabled the slackers to copy their homework from the smart kids — something most of the smart kids never intended when they posted their work.
What’s nagging me is the knowledge that the slackers who pass courses by using the work of others eventually earn the same degree as the smart kids. But as with any dilemma, I can see both sides of it.
Can you?
Bill;
This just in from one of my followers on LinkedIn
Roger Wohlner, CFP® has just left a comment on your network update:
“Kudos to this graduate student. Great business model, I see absolutely no ethical issues here. The student still has to learn and absorb the material and produce on papers/exams. Much ethical ado about nothing in my opinion.”
D. Bruce Johnston RT @BillSledzik Student business raises ethical dilemma? Help Bill sort it out: http://bit.ly/9oL6G4 Is this today’s eCliff Notes or more?
Happy Birthday to you and the “freak flag”.
Hey there, Chair!-
You present both sides of the argument very well, so the one comment I have is regarding your closing thought: “What’s nagging me is the knowledge that the slackers who pass courses by using the work of others eventually earn the same degree as the smart kids.” This happens every time a degree is handed out, regardless if they received it with the help of Flash Notes, in this case, or not. A degree is a degree (I’m aware of the repercussions of saying this to an academic!), and it’s what you do with the knowledge you gained in school (kind of) and life that will take you places. Every class and credit is based on an objective-as-possible mass scale, but in reality, it seems to be much more of a sweeping subjective scale than it appears. Conundrum.
Hope you’ve been well!
Bill,
Great analysis of the topic. Personally, I like what Michael has done. Sure, it could be used by slackers looking to pay their way to an advantage in the classroom, but how much different would that be from cliff notes? I feel good students will use it as an additional resource to what they’ve learned. Good professors will know to test in such a way so that online notes alone won’t help a deep-pocketed slacker ace a class they’d rather not attend.
The key is learning, and different students learn in different ways. I’ve personally walked out of college classes feeling I had learned little, then educated myself by reading through the notes I took. If learning is the ultimate goal, any tool can help.
@Bruce. I made the same point as Mr. Wohlner in my post. The business is enterprising, indeed.
BUT dismissing the ethical issue ignores the reality of the 2.0 digital world, one in which everything is available and no one is policing the propriety of the transactions. There’s a major ethical dilemma here.
Systems like FlashNotes have me asking “what’s next?” I will admit, I don’t know exactly how these guys will address academic honesty within their site (and maybe they don’t, either), but as the system grows, it’s gonna be tough to police what’s being posted and sold. It’s conceivable someone could post an outline of a research paper, complete with footnotes and lit reviews. The slope is a slippery one, especially when you consider that a major of college students admit to cheating at one time or another.
@Katy. Nice to hear from you. Hope all is well. On paper, a degree is a degree. You are correct. What you make of that degree is what matters. Also correct. But IF you produce assignments that are NOT the result of your own work — but the work of others, bought and paid for — that’s dishonest, and it serves no one.
I have no problem with the FlashNotes system so long it serves only as a tool to help students study. But you know and I know, students learn quickly how to game the system, especially when grades and money are involved. That’s my worry.
And why are you calling me “chair”?
@Sean. One of my Twitter buds raised the Cliff Notes example. It has some merit, but it’s not parallel. Online communities must police themselves, Cliff Notes has editors and a very nice kiosk in every college book story. Is anyone checking each submission to FlashNotes to see if it crosses into academic dishonesty? Is that even possible?
So what happens when folks start posting complete outlines of research papers, shorts essays and the like. That would enable a student to produce great work because it’s someone else’s.
I’m not really worried about tests. Hell, I almost NEVER give tests. I ask students to demonstrate their knowledge and thoughts processes in their writings. And as we move more an more toward online course delivery — well look how easy that me become.
Hah, as in Committee Chair, not the dining room set component.
This blog post has spurred an interesting conversation with my friend, and this dilemma boils down to a) this fast-paced easy-access seizure-inducing society determining how we live and b) bureaucracy. College and education is still a system with parameters and standards, where students needing to pass or thwart protocol. (And to your point, it will be a hairy situation for FlashNotes to determine and define the types of submissions and complete works to sell). It’s discussions like these that are positively able to foster creative and critical thinking, which should be the number one goal. ^5
@Katy. To your point, it’ll be up to FlashNotes managers to determine what to include and what to exclude. But if this thing really takes off — and becomes the home for hundreds of thousands of documents — that won’t be possible. This is the open system of 2.0, and it can lead to chaos.
I hope I’m over-reacting. But I don’t think so.
I think we’re largely ignoring another ethical dilemma here: Who polices FlashNotes to make sure the notes are legitimate? For instance, let’s say I purchased notes for a Marketing class and found them to be worthless and not based on course content. Who is responsible for the bad notes when FlashNotes doesn’t deliver? By the way, that’s not hypothetical.
If my experience is any indication, I wouldn’t worry about FlashNotes. Most students are quick to recognize a scam.
@Jason. In most cases, the community polices itself –eventually. Take the big guys like eBay and Amazon. Both had to establish supplier rating systems to separate the reliable suppliers from the bums. It seems to work well for those large-scale enterprises. My suggestion to FlashNotes would be a be a searchable discussion board of some sort that allows users of the site to share information. User reviews are also a way to do it. That works well on all sorts of sites.
I’m not an intellectual property lawyer, but I believe any notes I write about your lecture would be work I produced. It’s not your lecture; it’s a commentary on your lecture. That means those notes are mine to license or sell as I see fit.
There may be a considerable gap between any market value of those notes — and FlashNotes is simply serving as a market maker — and the actual value a purchaser derives in terms of those notes enabling the purchaser to realize a goal such as earning an A in your class. The notes might be functionally useless in the wrong hands, regardless of the price paid.
In other words, if a dolt buys my notes he’s still a dolt. Reading my notes is unlikely to change the outcome in the form of a final grade. They might aid a brighter student, but you’d have to do a study to see if simply reading or studying someone else’s notes actually affects the outcome. It could be the profs who insist the in-class experience is invaluable are correct.
You’re right about the potential slippery slope to selling completed research papers, but canned papers for sale have been around for decades. In practice they tend to have limited actual value because most assignments are specific enough to exclude all but the rare papers that just happen to align with the assignment. Also, a number of states have laws against selling such papers. More important, many of those papers are pretty lame anyway. Only the truly shiftless (and the average rich Ivy League brat) are happy buying a C-.
@Blair. I’m not a lawyer either, but how hard can it be? I also see NO legal issues. I also agree that dummies and slackers won’t be helped much by this process. They remain dummies and slackers. As I
I also don’t worry about completed research papers, since instructors can see much of the content and uncover the cheating fairly easily.
What worries me are outlines of those papers, complete with bibliographies, quotes from sources, etc., being sold as “study guides” or in some other category. Those outlines would enable students to write papers quickly without doing the work. Ditto for short assignments and essays. And I don’t believe the law can intercede there, since you’re only selling the raw materials. And were I a hardworking student who understood the research process, I could see myself makin’ a lot a money on this.
An important distinction between completed papers and outlines, Bill, one you’d made earlier and that my comments admittedly glossed over. I suppose the only reply to your point is once again, if an inept student writes a paper using such an outline and sources, chances are good the final paper will still be badly written and incoherently argued. Without understanding the context of quotes — typically gained only by reading the passage cited — it’s difficult for a lazy and inept student to employ those quotes in a convincing fashion. And a bad writer will make a hash of assembling the materials in the outline anyway.
It’s like building a house. I can give anyone all the best materials needed to build a house, but unless you understand how to put all those parts together and have the requisite skills in concrete and masonry work, carpentry and roofing, wiring and plumbing, the end result will look awful, be uninhabitable, and won’t sell to anyone.
To be sure, those outlines will make it easier for a few slicksters to sleaze through their courses. But those just-do-enough-to-get-by slackers are found everywhere in life, and even in the classroom it’s impossible to adequately penalize those who fake it well enough to pass.
I suppose our only difference is I don’t believe good students will be much affected by the availability of these materials. As you observe, they may be generating these materials and thus defraying some of the costs of their education. Marginal students may realize a marginal gain. And the inept in a particular discipline will still be inept, and as I think we do agree, the sooner the inept can be steered to another discipline where they may have real aptitude and talent, the better for both those students and the programs they leave behind.
Bill, one point we both missed. There are disincentives for good students to share their work. First, they recognize they may enable marginal people to join their profession in the future, where they’ll be stuck with them. Second, there’s an undesirable curve effect on grades while they’re still in school. If marginal students improve the appearance of their work, it will most likely subtly raise professors’ standards for an A, making it harder for the good students themselves. I believe most undergraduates recognize the truth in the aphorism: “It is not enough that I succeed. You must fail.”
An interesting read but I agree with Blair Boone, if they don’t have ample skills in constructing an essay an outline will only make a shackle.
And students that are good enough to understand it should be able to take the “shortcut” if they want since this is what they will do in their professional life as well. Better learning a skill they will utilize later than learning it the “proper way”.
In an information age, where we have access to it just a click away, why not allow access to curated content. If this allows students to learn in a more effective way then why is it better spending more time in a class-room to learn the same thing?
The biggest impact flash-notes has is on the teachers and their way of teaching. It’s no longer possible to keep the same curriculum and questions year after year or have simple fact knowledge questions. More focus needs to be on questions that require more analyzing.
Sorry I’m late to the conversation…
A lot of concerns have been addressed in the comments that I won’t reiterate, but I do want to address a few issues:
1) If used correctly, this is not in anyway cheating or academic dishonesty. It will do a student no good to purchase the notes if they don’t use them as a study resource. The site is ideal for freshmen who may not have learned note-taking techniques yet, students who would rather participate than take notes during class, students who have a difficult time grasping the concept and students who miss class for unavoidable reasons. People can always find a way to cheat the system if they really want to, that is not what this site is designed for.
2) Users police the site. If they see content that is illegally posted, they can flag it and the site administrators will remove it.
3) FlashNots holds seller payments until the Friday following a sale. This way, if the buyer feels the notes were no good, they can request a full refund. If FlashNotes agrees with the buyer then the seller will not be paid for that transaction and the buyer will receive a refund. Also, notes are rated by users, so if the notes have been purchased by other students as well, the incoming purchaser will see the review.