Flashnotes deal could mean more money for students, but a bad deal for professors

This story was edited to add clarification from Flashnotes CEO and founder Michael Matousek; to reword misleading interpretations of quotes from Flashnotes board member Lester Lefton; and to streamline wording. We regret these errors.

A business deal with Flashnotes.com has students making up to $5,000 a semester and University of Toledo professors concerned about their intellectual property rights.

UT entered into a business deal with Flashnotes in July 2014. The online service provides a marketplace for students to buy and sell notes, study guides and flashcards for courses. According to Associate Provost Kelly Moore, this partnership was reached in hopes of being useful to students with accessibility needs.

A student attends class, takes notes on their professor’s lectures, and uploads their notes to the Flashnotes website. From that point, the Office of Student Disability Services will see how much a student made on Flashnotes.

Through this office, students can earn up to $100 a semester as a note-taker, according to Toni Howard from the Office of Student Disability Services.

Students cannot double-dip and be paid by both Flashnotes and UT after they cross UT’s $100 limit. Once that limit is reached, students’ compensation comes exclusively from Flashnotes users.

Flashnotes note-takers make an average of $31 per hour, with some earning $5,000 a semester according to Flashnotes statistics.

Despite UT’s partnership with Flashnotes, many faculty members are concerned about where their materials fit into this partnership.

“The question is,” Moore said, “what is our relationship with Flashnotes, and how does it protect professors’ intellectual rights in their lectures, lecture materials, that kind of thing.”

The regulation of these websites is a concern of many of the faculty members.

“One of the biggest problems is that there seems to be no regulation,” said Faculty Senate President Karen Hoblet. “Anyone can purchase notes anywhere.”

Kennedy said this service is more regulated than other services.

“Professors are worried about their own lecture notes which they post online for students to download,” said communication professor Jacqueline Layng, “then students are selling these notes on the site so they feel like their work is being stolen and the students are receiving compensation but not the professors who created the lecture notes.”

Several of these websites are able to be accessed from students across the country.

“I actually got a lovely email recently from a student at the University of Minnesota thanking me for how well my class notes were that they had purchased from another of these sites,” Moore said.

Few scholars sell their work for a lot of money, according to Sharon Barnes, a women and gender studies professor.

“Many of us are squeamish about having someone potentially mess with our intellectual property,” Barnes said, “like the student note-takers who sell their notes on Flashnotes, identify it as ours, with all of the note-taker’s errors, interpretations, et cetera, and make a profit from it.”

Flashnotes board member Lester Lefton, former president of Kent State University, thinks peer-to-peer learning is important to academic success.

“Flashnotes.com is emerging as a leading force in helping to reshape higher education,” Lefton said, “and has the potential to create real change by helping students to learn from one another — and to succeed academically as well as financially.“

Lefton, as well as the Flashnotes board, supports the idea that because students are interpreting the class material, class notes are the student’s intellectual property.

“Students know what other students want and need to know,” Lefton said. “Students trust their peers for insights. They intuit what other students don’t understand, and it goes back to the earliest educational model, one-on-one tutoring.”

According to Flashnotes CEO and founder Michael Matousek, uploaded material is monitored by an internal review board, which in turn follows copyright law outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.

“A students’ class notes are their own interpretation of the subject matter that’s being taught by the professor — and those interpretations are the student’s own intellectual property,” Matousek said.

Lefton said Flashnotes “gives a student insight, interaction and a student focus,” making it another resource a student can use for learning, “and that is the ultimate goal: providing students learning tools so they can succeed.”

Howard said changes may be made to the business deal later in the week.