A potentially troublesome website was presented to Stan State faculty at the most recent Academic Senate meeting on Aug. 28.
The website, CourseHero, encourages college students to sell their notes to the website in order to provide assistance to whose who might be taking the same class.
65 departments are listed with materials on Stan State’s Course Hero page. 
“There are documents that are posted up there that are student notes, but some of them are your course materials that you developed and that you may have copyrights to,” said Betsy Eudey as she warned the faculty at the Academic Senate meeting on Aug. 28. 
The general consensus among Stan State students seems to be that they are unaware of Course Hero, and that they have a general disinterest in paying for the website’s services.
The website offers services with three different payment plans:

• Annual Membership:  12 months of unlimited access for $9.95/month
• Quarterly Membership: 3 months of unlimited access for $19.95/month
• Monthly Membership: 1 Month of unlimited access for $39.95/month 

If you choose not to pay for the site’s unlimited access services, you are limited to a certain amount of free previews. If you make an account on CourseHero, you can view payment options here.
Various Stan State professors have their coursework posted on CourseHero, including Dr. Chris Nagel (Philosophy).
Nagel said some of the material on the site was information he no longer used in teaching his courses.
“I didn’t notice any particular assignments that I’ve used in my courses, but I saw outlines and notes from reading assignments I’ve used in the past,” said Nagel.
“Of course it bothers me that any material related to my course is up there. Even if it’s student notes based on my reading assignments or discussions of the material in class, it is part of a course that I have prepared and taught,” Nagel said. “The intellectual property of the course, including choice of reading assignments, is mine—morally, if not legally.”
Dr. Terry Jones (Biology), said, “If my stuff was on there, I would not be happy about it.” He also indicated that an email was sent out to most of the faculty on campus, but outside of that email, he had not heard much about Course Hero.
Course Hero poses some legal issues that Judicial Affairs could potentially have to deal with.
Dr. Clarissa Lonn-Nichols, Special Assistant to the VP of Student Affairs and Student Conduct Administrator, talked about the issue of academic dishonesty and plagiarism, which both break the student code of conduct.
“I would caution everybody on thinking that, ‘oh it’s just a third party site and maybe nobody will know,'” Lonn-Nichols said.
She explained that professors are able to scan papers through a system that will check the similarity of a paper with papers that have been submitted in the past. This would make it difficult to pull material off of CourseHero to try and boost your paper that might be due.
Plagiarism violates the student code of conduct. Consequences for plagiarism range from restitution, or “appropriate service and/or monetary material replacement,” to expulsion, if there are multiple violations.
With the cost and potential implications of using posted materials, Course Hero doesn’t seem to be an easy fix for getting a last minute paper done.