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A New Learning Tool
Students at 62 large university campuses across the United States can take heart: They may never have to take notes in a lecture again.
An upstart Internet venture calling itself http://wmv.studentu.com is hiring students this semester and paying them to take notes in as many as 50 core courses per campus.
The note-takers post their jottings electronically, within 24 hours, on a central website.
Among the dozens of notes already listed are those taken Tuesday during Professor John Syer's course on world politics at California State University in Sacramento and on Aug. 24 during Professor Robert Schwebach’s lecture on financial markets at Colorado State University.
The service, which first went on-line 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 this week from his Houston office, as he admitted that he, too, 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 get A’s.”
There is no shortage of critics who believe that the arrival of Mr. Wolfs venture — along with other websites 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, thinks 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. Wolfs 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.
I am troubled by it because I, like thousands of faculty members, spent a great deal of time developing my courses within a specific intellectual context, a context that I control,” he said.
Mr. Wolf said the seeds of his idea were first sown while he was studying economics at Austin, when he had occasionally taken advantage of a similar service there: For $30 per class, a private note-taking firm would arrange for him to get paper copies of any notes that he might have missed.
After graduating in 1995 and moving to Houston, he learned that the university there had no such service, and so he founded his own. Initially taking 10 hours of notes a day himself, he quickly expanded his operation to include about 3,000 subscribers — they, too, paid $30 for each of 120 classes — and about 40 note-takers.
Mr. Wolf said professors at the University of Houston were initially wary of helping him and his note-takers gain access to classes, if they were not enrolled.
But he said he won them over when they realized that attendance did not drop as a result.
When Mr. Wolf discovered that such services were rare on other campuses, he said he decided to take his operation national.
With an investment from New Strategy, a Houston company that has nurtured other web companies, and rolling banner of advertisements that includes the Capital One Visa Platinium Card, Mr. Wolf began recruiting note-takers at fraternities at 62 of the largest colleges and universities throughout the United States.
Because he has assembled his operation so quickly, using students already in courses, Mr. Wolf said he would not be asking professors for permission to broadcast their notes.
Thus, many are likely to be as surprised as Professor Syer at Sacramento who learned from a reporter Wednesday that his introduction to the world’s 10 largest countries had been reproduced by an anonymous note-taker for all to see.
“I’m not unalterably opposed to this dissemination,” he said.
"I’d just like to know how wide my audience is. I’m going to get up there and take on the policies of the US government, the policies of the Indonesian government, the policies of the Chinese government”
“If I think this is something that is going to be quoted globally," he said, “it may change what I say."