Course Hero Quietly Gobbles Up More
Plus, this year's Course Hero List of Shame. Plus, another quote of the year candidate. Plus, Chegg in Australia.
Issue 143
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Course Hero Acquires Lumen Learning
You probably missed it - and just about everyone did - when Course Hero bought the open educational resource (OER) company Lumen Learning. There was not much of an announcement. Instead, some “educators stumbled onto the fact that hosting had changed hands,” an education news outlet reported.
The development is interesting. The coverage is amazing.
First, the reporting describes Course Hero as:
the homework-help site that relies on student-generated content
That’s hysterical.
That’s just not what Course Hero does anymore. Not all it does anyway (see Issue 97). Course Hero sells answers on demand, just like Chegg. It owns an automated paraphrasing service (see Issue 92).
And if you poke around even five seconds, you see that most of their content is not generated by students but uploaded by them. It’s created by others, usually professors.
But in any case, the discovery of the takeover, the outlet reported:
provoked a backlash. Educators expressed their displeasure on social media and in OER discussion groups, in part because of Course Hero itself, which some educators feel encourages students to cheat with the course notes and other materials posted there, but also because the deal wasn’t announced, and they felt that its parameters were unclear.
I bet. If I were invested in the bright future of OER, I’d be quite angry that some of them were now nestled under the banner of a notorious cheating provider - tainted, corrupted.
Not only was there no announcement of the deal, but:
a Course Hero spokesperson declined to answer if any money changed hands as part of the deal
It’s a parlor game, sure. But I do feel that if no money changed hands, they would say so. More:
The official also declined to say what, if anything, was given to Lumen in exchange for the redirected traffic that the OER content brings.
But the part of the coverage that literally made me laugh was when the reporter pointed out that the deal would be further complicated because:
some campus networks have actually blocked Course Hero’s core service domains.
Yes, they have. And they should. Because Course Hero is a cheating site. It’s literally blacklisted by Cisco as an “academic fraud” site (see Issue 42).
And about that, about their site being blocked by colleges, Sean Michael Morris, a Course Hero VP, had what has to be another strong contender for the academic integrity quote of the year. Morris said:
As a representative of Course Hero, I would say, try to get your university to not block us anymore. That would be great.
I cannot even process that. Morris, later, clarified it was a joke. And it absolutely is. Getting colleges to unblock Course Hero is downright funny.
Course Hero List of Shame, 2022 Edition
This year’s bizarre Course Hero “summit” happened a few weeks ago. Last year, we shared a “List of Shame” of those educators who participated (see Issue 44).
And, as with last year, I cannot confirm these folks below actually participated. Though if you want to check, you can register to watch the whole thing at the link above. And if you’re C.V. is a little light, Course Hero says:
Attendees will receive a Certificate of Participation
Tenure track here we come.
Without more ado, here’s this year’s list of educators who, I would think, ought to know better than to stand with Course Hero:
Michael Sorrell, President, Paul Quinn College
Gaye Theresa Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles
Michelle Miller, Northern Arizona University
Kelly Pope, DePaul University
Roberto Montoya, Colorado Department of Higher Education
J. Luke Wood, San Diego State University
Mary McNaughton-Cassill, University of Texas at San Antonio
Catherine Ross, The University of Texas at Tyler
Laura Summers, University of Colorado Denver
Fabiola Torres, Glendale Community College
Alka Arora, California Institute of Integral Studies
Stephanie Speicher, Weber State University
Ben Wiggins, Shoreline Community College
Jonathan Chin, Medgar Evers College, CUNY
Malynda Mabbitt, South Dakota State University
Teresa Foulger, Arizona State University
Cynthia van Golen, Delaware State University
Rachel Reed, Arizona State University
Paulette Stevenson, Mesa Community College
Marianna Burks, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Norma Hernandez, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Jill Purdy, Cedar Crest College
Emily Dosmar, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Kate Elgayeva, University of Minnesota Duluth
Brian Dickson, Community College of Denver
Chegg: “The billion-dollar industry helping students at major Australian universities cheat”
The Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) is the national broadcaster of Australia. A few weeks ago, ABC ran a story about “the billion-dollar industry helping students at major Australian universities cheat online assessments.”
And I already ruined it in the headline. Chegg. It’s Chegg.
It’s a decent read. It starts with story of Ramesh, a student stretched between job and school:
In his desperate attempt to juggle work and study, Ramesh has found a solution. He cheats.
It continues:
He isn't worried about getting caught, because he says everyone's doing it.
"You don't get caught … you're at home and there's no supervision, so there's no chance of getting caught."
No supervision. No chance of getting caught.
It goes on:
in the post-COVID era of online assessments, [Ramesh] has some powerful new allies — billion-dollar companies which have been accused of being industrialised cheating factories.
They market themselves as study aids, but they profit enormously from helping students cheat, and they boomed during the pandemic with the shift to online learning.
In a single month in 2020, cheating websites received around 7.3 million clicks from Australian students, an increase of 50 per cent on 2019 figures, according to Australia's academic integrity regulator.
Since then those monthly hits have fallen back but still remain above pre-pandemic levels at 5.9 million hits.
And one of the biggest players is a company called Chegg.
Let’s do that again. Billion-dollar companies. Accused of industrialized cheating. Market themselves as study aids. 5.9 million hits a month, which is 200,000 a day. Chegg.
Check. Check. Check. Check. And check.
That part is dead on and reminds of the cover-story expose on Chegg that Forbes did last year.
ABC goes on to show how Chegg works, how easy it is to use to cheat:
For little more than a Netflix subscription, students can upload questions, and get the correct answers in minutes.
Many are uploading questions in the middle of exams, sometimes in defiance of anti-cheat software designed to catch them out.
Professor Phillip Dawson, an expert in academic integrity, and friend of The Cheat Sheet, from Deakin University told ABC:
“Chegg is not a legitimate student service, they primarily provide cheating services"
And:
"Their profits come from helping students to cheat and I would be amazed if they don't know this"
Ah, yup.
ABC reports:
around 30 million people visit the website, and it has around 7.8 million subscribers — that's more than three times what it was before the pandemic.
Also true.
It also quotes Kane Murdoch, manager of Complaints, Appeals and Misconduct at Macquarie University, who rightly says that few cheaters are being caught and that:
cheating services are evolving faster than universities' attempts to stop them.
But then the story swerves bizarrely into exam proctoring, the tools schools use to deter and catch cheating saying:
But there's little research to show whether these types of software effectively detect cheating.
Although, there is (see Issue 4 or Issue 112).
The hair being spliced here may be between “stopping” cheating and “detecting” it. I think it’s clear that “stopping” cheating is preferable to “catching” it and that proctoring does catch many students cheating. I even wrote about a few. And I think its effectiveness as a deterrent is unchallenged (see Issue 45).
The other hair being split may also be about “research,” of which there is little - not none, but little. And that’s quite different from evidence. There’s a mountain of evidence that proctoring both stops and detects cheating.
And it’s odd, in my view, to bemoan cheating online and poke at the tools that stop it.
Scroll up, for example, and read the quote from “Ramesh” again. He says there’s no supervision and no one is getting caught. So everyone is cheating. He’s right.
But overall the article is important in raising the issue of Chegg and its cheating cousins in Australia, where I’m willing to wager that Chegg-style cheating is more common than essay mill cheating. But where, so far, the government has not acted (see Issue 142).
Course Hero’s QuillBot - the paraphrasing tool - is giving away memberships so students can “save time and write better.”
Why an “education company” like Course Hero needs a paraphrasing engine is - well, an excellent question.
Here’s their ad:
