Commercial Notetaking Task Force

History

Notetaking, its value to students, and the dispersal of class notes are omnipresent in the history of higher education. In the United States, students have been taking notes during their college classes since the time of the first lectures at Harvard University over three centuries ago. Notes taken during a class session facilitate studying and learning; and they provide students with an effective way of capturing important facts and ideas proffered by their teachers.

While taking good class notes is worthwhile for any postsecondary student, acquiring good class notes is a valued asset for many students. There are numerous historical accounts of students passing along class notes to siblings and friends. Some fraternities, athletic teams, cultural clubs, and other student organizations maintain extensive libraries of class notes, tests, compositions, and other academically related resources for their members. Resourceful seniors and juniors have been known to sell their class notes to first-year and sophomore students.

The student demand for "course coverage" is so great that, at some colleges, student governments have created student-run notetaking services, which provide notes to students for free, at cost, or for profit. At a few other schools, the institution has contracted with an individual notetaking service to "vend" to its students. At others, the institution provides internal notetaking services—much as the University provides internal photocopying services. At most institutions, however, the organized distribution of class notes has been seized by commercial notetaking services and is generally viewed as unseemly—at best—by the faculty and administration.

The existence of commercial notetaking services is not an emergent phenomenon; they have been selling class notes since at least the early 1960's. These services hire people—sometimes students, sometimes others—to take notes during college classes. Ostensibly, the notes are edited and then made available to students. Traditional notetaking services, such as Grade A Notes and Blue Notes, sell notes to students in packets which are composed of "last year's notes" or installments of the current year's notes. These services tend to gather and sell notes for large lecture classes. Students have been known to pay as much as $150 for a "high quality" set of course notes.

For the last two and a half decades, the distribution of class notes has been limited to a largely local circulation. That is, notes from specific universities were generally made available only to students at those institutions. While many Universities did not embrace the local notetaking services, they were typically part of the town/gown community, which meant there were established avenues of communication and some common ground. Also, the notetaking services were usually small businesses, which meant the institution was not likely to be pushed too far by the small venture.

With the recent popularity of the internet and e-commerce, commercial notetaking services have moved on-line, explosively. Within the past year, at least thirteen commercial notetaking companies have begun to provide on-line service and the numbers are growing. What was once a cottage industry is now attracting millions of dollars in capital investment, professional business strategists, entrepreneurs, and considerable attention. In the last year alone over 100 articles have been written about on-line commercial notetaking and in the last several months one of the on-line sites claims to attract up to 1 million hits per day.

What the on-line services offer is speed, an efficient business model, and unlimited access from anywhere to FREE class notes and an archive that can exist in perpetuity. Thus, lecture notes from "Psych 111" at the University of Michigan are now available to the entire planet for the cost of internet access. Where traditional, hard-copy course notes were funded out of student pocket money, on-line services are funded by advertising from the likes of Fortune 500 companies.

COMMERCIAL NOTETAKING TASK FORCE REPORT