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Welcome to this week's edition of "Transforming Pedagogy and Learning," a column that explores how colleges and professors are reimagining how they teach and how students learn. Please share your ideas here for issues to examine, hard questions to ask and experiments -- successes and failures -- to highlight. If you'd like to receive the free "Transforming Teaching and Learning" newsletter, please sign upwardly here. And please follow usa on Twitter @ihelearning.

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Gaye Theresa Johnson's initial feel with Form Hero nearly a decade ago was non a positive one. Every bit an early-career kinesthesia 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.

"We were already in the digital age, simply it nonetheless felt like cheating to me," says Johnson. Equally 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 Grade Hero. Just as someone who, now at 47 years of historic period, describes herself as "old school," "I still viewed information technology pretty antagonistically."

As fourth dimension passed, though, Johnson's view shifted. Today'southward students, she says, aren't like she was -- someone who got an opportunity to exist educated in "the about traditional ways" (in-person, often in modest classes), and had "great experiences … that were one of the major things that shaped me."

"But I am open enough to see that the students are not in that place anymore -- that's non who they are. The world has changed," she says. "Merely as I realized it wasn't realistic for me to say, 'No laptops in form anymore,' it'south clear that students don't use the encyclopedia anymore. They employ YouTube; they learn through sharing."

She adds, "The tools have inverse; the scene has changed. If I don't embrace this new mode that students are learning, I'm doing them a disservice. We educators have to alter, besides."

Johnson says Course Hero has helped her encompass that change. She is not simply 1 of the xxx,000 faculty participants in Course Hero's instructor portal (the "faculty club"), merely she also enthusiastically attends the company's almanac educator briefing and has had her educational activity profiled on the company'south website.

A decade ago, Inside Higher Ed and other publications were filled with headlines on faculty concerns nigh students' use of sites like Course Hero for sharing course materials. (One 2009 article in Inside Higher Ed, entitled "Course Hero or Form Villain," featured numerous professors bemoaning the appearance of their copyrighted course materials on such quiz- and homework-sharing sites and others describing the portals equally "really fertile ground for plagiarism and dishonesty.")

But that very same article also quoted a longtime adjunct instructor acknowledging the potential power of a learning-based social networking site. "Imagine concern 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 so. "This may go the 'study group' of the 21st century."

The copyright and cheating concerns have not disappeared, and less than a year ago faculty members at Purdue Academy objected to a partnership betwixt the institution'south well-regarded Online Writing Lab and Chegg, citing cheating concerns.

Just the supportive views like those expressed by UCLA's Johnson seem to comfortably coexist alongside the lingering concerns. The shift has not been entirely coincidental, at least in Course Hero's case. The visitor, says CEO and co-founder Andrew Grauer, has invested "meaningfully" in edifice 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. (He declines to share a specific dollar amount.)

Course Hero made news in business and technology publications terminal week by becoming the latest education applied science visitor to see its value soar by $one billion. This column explores an issue altogether different from Course Hero'south valuation: Has the company go a valued player in the learning ecosystem in the optics of faculty members? Have concerns virtually copyright and cheating dissipated?

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Course Hero was founded in 2006, one of a slew of websites that enabled students to post and download syllabi, worksheets, essays, previous exams and other course materials. Among its differentiators was that the materials were all tied to specific courses. Students pay either a monthly or an annual fee to download textile -- the fee can exist limited or waived if they themselves upload content to the marketplace. It is likewise one of many places on the internet where students can pay for tutoring assist.

The company generated a skillful scrap of early on criticism -- arguably a sign of its impact. Aggrieved faculty members complained that students were sharing instructors' intellectual holding without their permission and enabling the sort of questionable sharing of academic work that previously was available only in a fraternity-business firm basement or a serenity meeting amidst the campus library stacks.

Grade Hero officials at the time said that they responded aggressively to complaints brought under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but that "as a user-generated content site, we don't review the content … Unfortunately, at times we recognize that users may submit materials that they don't have rights to."

The company has also taken numerous steps to try to gainsay cheating (which we'll describe afterwards in the article).

None of those complaints seemed to impede Course Hero's growth amongst students. Information technology at present receives nigh 400 million visits a year; Grauer tells business concern publications that the visitor exceeds $100 meg in revenue, mostly from about 1 million subscribers paying $40 a calendar month or $120 a year. Most of the visits involve students exploring and using the site'south roughly 30 meg educational resources that their peers (and instructors) accept shared. Visitors besides can tap into Class Hero'south tutoring network to get "24/vii homework assist."

"Everything nosotros do is designed to help students practice, learn and become unstuck," says Grauer, who co-founded the company as a student at Cornell University.

A Focus on the Kinesthesia

Edifice out the website'south resource-sharing platform remains Course Hero'due south pinnacle priority. Just its other two "big bets," Grauer says, are (ane) using the vast data at its disposal (in terms of the sorts of content and help students are looking for) to create its own content and (2) edifice out its portal for educators.

"At that place are so many nifty teaching faculty who are dedicated to agile learning and to their education, and we're focused on bringing them into the ecosystem to make information technology richer and much more powerful for our users," Grauer says.

While the site is still geared primarily to students, Course Hero is amassing significant content virtually, for and from college faculty members. Most 30,000 professors from colleges and universities in the U.S. have a presence on the platform -- many accept profiles, while others take been subjects of highly produced videos of instructors Class Hero deems "master educators."

The company too 2 years ago started a fellowship programme through the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which in 2019 awarded grants of $30,000 to four tenure-track instructors and grants of $20,000 to 4 adjuncts or instructors off the tenure runway.

"Then many awards and fellowships don't really recognize and applaud first-class postsecondary pedagogy," says Patrick Riccards, a spokesman for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. "We believed we could piece of work with Course Hero to put forward a good product, put together something that would positively bear upon the academy."

Grauer said the focus on adjuncts was not adventitious.

"About 70-75 percent of the [roughly] 1.5 1000000 U.S. higher instructors are adjuncts often pedagogy courses at multiple institutions or working some other job trying to brand ends run across," he says via electronic mail. "These educators take a need to observe and create teaching and cess materials ameliorate and faster. We think it is mission critical to support, amplify and celebrate these educators and their contributions. We are doing this by building a community of do that facilitates the sharing of those resources and their utilise -- for the benefit of students."

Class Hero's focus on making heroes out of the faculty is rather uncommon among technology companies, and its rationale for investing in professors sounds reasonable.

But a skeptic (say, a reporter) might wonder if Course Hero is also making its large investment -- which conspicuously seems to exist in the multiple millions of dollars a year -- to edgeless the historical criticisms and win hearts and minds. "Does all this investment," I asked Grauer in an interview, "build faculty support for what you do?"

"I certainly promise then," he replies. "But Course Hero didn't -- doesn't -- need to make this investment in educators. Others haven't, or haven't yet. But nosotros think the outcome of doing so volition be to make a really powerful platform of apace accessible and affordable resources from as many different people and places as possible. And we discover that what educators seem to appreciate the most is only having conversations with them and listening to them as they talk about their teaching. That's been at the heart of what nosotros do."

Course Hero officials certainly believe they've moved the needle on faculty opinion. The visitor tracks educator stance through regular surveys, and its year-terminate poll of 800 educators found that 43 percentage were aware of Course Hero, and of those, between three-quarters and four-fifths were either positive or neutral in their views of the company, whether it helps students larn and whether they trusted it.

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Faculty members like Gaye Johnson say Course Hero meets their needs in multiple means. When she needed ideas for new classroom exercises or assessment bug, she "used to simply inquire a friend or a colleague in my section," Johnson says. "But I like existence role of a community where educators believe in that kind of sharing, and I want to be able to do that beyond disciplines and across the country, not just [with] the person across the hall."

She also believes that when a Grade Hero-hired author profiles one of her course strategies, they will convey an understanding of her that few people beyond her classroom might see.

"They asked me to explain why I teach this manner, why I believe in democratization in educational activity," Johnson says. "If someone were to follow me on Course Hero, they will see why I remember what I do is important."

Barbara Oakley had slightly different reasons for embracing the Grade Hero approach. Long before she was a professor of applied science at Oakland University and the creator of 1 of the world's most-attended massive open online courses (boasting 1.9 million enrollees), Oakley was an army captain who had studied Russian but hated math.

When she returned to college at age 26 to report applied science, she felt similar an outsider. Oakley failed an early exam in a class on circuits, she says, considering she didn't empathise a concept the professor had never introduced in class. Other students didn't fail -- and when she pressed, she learned that most of them had had an former exam of his that revealed the pull a fast one on.

"I never knew that was a thing to practice," Oakley says. "You had to get into a clique."

A platform like Course Hero "helps level the playing field," Oakley says, letting students "who were like me or had more disadvantages get some of that insider knowledge. It gives students access to extra do problems to work with.

"And it makes my life easier," she continues. "If you've been teaching a course for 15 to 20 years, it's difficult to come upward with anything new, then you might offset to recycle old tests from 5 or 10 years before. From my perspective, if a student wants to expect at v to 10 years of my quondam tests and happens to find something I'm putting on [an exam] over again, that means they're working really hard, doing lots of problems."

And the Form Hero teaching pinnacle? "It's a really dainty manner of interacting with all of these wonderful, upbeat professors who are really open with their materials and want to aid their colleagues become better," Oakley says. "In that location'south nada better for my instruction adrenaline than that."

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David Rettinger appreciates that modify is afoot in higher instruction, as professors similar Gaye Johnson and Barbara Oakley suggest, and that faculty members may not be adjusting sufficiently to it. It's a "totally legitimate signal that sharing documents can be beneficial in some particular cases and that tutoring tin can be legitimate in many cases," says Rettinger, professor of psychological sciences and director of bookish programs at the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia.

Higher instruction is evolving "to be more than collaborative and dynamic and less lecture/test/inquiry paper-based," Rettinger adds. And when that happens, he says, "engineering science and teaching will come together in means that really do good students."

Right now, though, "at that place'south a very serious gap between those things, and in my experience, faculty in the U.S. are largely naïve and unaware of the tremendous problem that technology is creating for contract cheating and file sharing."

Rettinger's other relevant function: president of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

He goes out of his mode to say that he isn't anti-engineering science, and he says he believes "at that place's certainly a lot of legitimate learning that goes on on Grade Hero" and other sites. (He acknowledges that his girl, an unproblematic school student, "uses Quizlet all the time" to find extra problems to drill on.)

The philosophical premise behind sharing websites like Grade Hero -- and backside getting a higher pedagogy, for that matter -- is that "there'due south some pedagogical learning value that comes out" of exploring the educational materials you might notice on such sites, Rettinger says.

Simply another major shift that's unfolding, he says, is that more and more than students are entering higher -- and, one would presume, using platforms like Course Hero -- not to drive their learning but to pursue a credential. They may exist less interested in learning, and more in getting the answers they need to finish a homework assignment.

While on the phone with this reporter, Rettinger goes to Course Hero's 24-vii tutoring page and identifies a set of educatee queries that seem designed to solicit answers to homework rather than to assist a student build his or her understanding of the subject matter.

In his ain field, cognitive psychology, he finds numerous study guides that students accept created. "Could it be the case that someone's report guide could exist helpful to their peers? Sure," he says. "Only I e'er tell my students to make their own study guide -- that's the best way to learn the material. So here is a shortcut that is actively unhelpful to their peers."

It gets worse, Rettinger continues. "I meet a lot of papers on there -- completed work in response to prompts. That to me is a recipe to encouraging people to cheat.

"Information technology'due south a market. If Napster was shut downwards for being a piracy site, I don't see how this is dissimilar.... They may say, 'Information technology's not our fault if students use our tool for ill -- we ask them not to.' But I think we tin can generally agree that when you lot lower the bar for doing something dishonest, you're contributing to that dishonest behavior."

"Fifty-fifty if you lot tell me just a third is file [of the activity on Class Hero] is sharing for cheating purposes, they've got millions of users."

Rettinger ultimately believes that transparency is at the core of this problem. "If students knew where faculty were getting the resources nosotros were using, and students were transparent about where they were getting their answers, this wouldn't really be an issue," he says.

"If y'all're my student and you want to use Course Hero tutoring, accept at it," he says. "Send me the transcript and so I can run across what you were struggling with and how they helped. If yous're unwilling to share that, I'd have to enquire, 'What are you lot hiding?'"

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Grauer, the Form Hero CEO and co-founder, says the visitor combats potential academic misconduct in every mode it tin can. Any time information technology identifies cases of corruption, "or where information technology becomes exceedingly clear that there is abuse," site monitors "remove that content."

"And if nosotros first to identify different keyword phrases that seem to violate standards of academic integrity, we don't permit those questions" to go through to tutors.

Across private reports or cases, Course Hero "makes the content in our library equally indexable by search engines as possible," Grauer says. "If they're going to use content from our site and turn information technology in as their own, we've fabricated it as piece of cake as possible for that to be detected" by instructors.

"Through moderation, we commit to doing our best to protect and uphold academic integrity," he says. "That said, in an open up platform like this, the issues you talked near are going to come up, and nosotros demand to respond to them promptly and thoughtfully."

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Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2020/02/19/course-hero-once-vilified-faculty-courts-professors-its

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