Johnson says Course Hero has helped her embrace that change. She is not only one of the 30,000 faculty participants in Course Hero's instructor portal (the " faculty club "), but she also enthusiastically attends the company's annual educator conference and has had her teaching profiled on the company’s website.
But its other two “big bets,” Grauer says, are (1) using the vast data at its disposal (in terms of the sorts of content and help students are looking for) to create its own content and (2) building out its portal for educators.
The philosophical premise behind sharing websites like Course Hero -- and behind getting a higher education, for that matter -- is that "there’s some pedagogical learning value that comes out" of exploring the educational materials you might find on such sites, Rettinger says.
Course Hero made news in business and technology publications last week by becoming the latest education technology company to see its value soar past $1 billion. This column explores an issue altogether different from Course Hero's valuation: Has the company become a valued player in the learning ecosystem in the eyes of faculty members? Have concerns about copyright and cheating dissipated?
Grauer, the Course Hero CEO and co-founder, says the company combats potential academic misconduct in every way it can. Any time it identifies cases of abuse, "or where it becomes exceedingly clear that there is abuse," site monitors "remove that content.".
The company's website for sharing course materials is popular with students but a decade ago raised faculty hackles over copyright and enabling cheating. Has its outreach to professors changed the narrative?
Course Hero officials at the time said that they responded aggressively to complaints brought under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but that “as a user-generated content site, we don’t review the content … Unfortunately, at times we recognize that users may submit materials that they don’t have rights to.”