On Campus

Skipping class made easy

Two websites launch where students can buy and sell course notes

Students who miss class or who have poor note-taking skills now have an option to buy notes from their peers online. Two websites, StudyMonkey.ca and Notewagon.com, catering to students looking to either sell or purchase class notes have recently launched at several universities, including all three Toronto schools, the University of Waterloo and the University of Western Ontario.

“The point of university is to learn the content, not attend every class,” Khaled Hashem, head of marketing at U of T for Notewagon.com, said. He added that “There is a huge opportunity for students to make money.” Repositories for students to buy and sell notes are common in the United States, but are only starting to take root in Canada.

One Ryerson professor said the service encourages laziness, and feeds “into an element of passiveness about student learning that we see increasing in classrooms.” Another suggested that the websites could violate copyright rules, pointing out that the “notes themselves are based on lectures, and the lecture material is the intellectual property of the professor.”

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