Our founder Emily Sawtell, recently contributed to Dan Northern’s CollegeThrive.com where she shared her insight on how students can leverage the internet to boost their grades and ensure academic success.
Want to learn what resources are available to help you achieve high grades? Check out the full post here: http://collegethrive.com/use-the-web-to-boost-your-gpa
GradeGuru was just featured on CollegeThrive a site focused on providing students with tips and resources to help them better prepare and manage university life.
GradeGuru was cited as a great resource to find course materials.
The post highlights some of GradeGuru’s key features including inviting your friends and classmates to join as well as earning rewards for your contributions to the community.
GradeGuru was just featured on Student Stuff !!
Student Stuff offers help with college applications, advice on which student activities to get involved with, managing your budget, useful study tips and other college “stuff”. Check out studentstuff.com for more info and college resources.
Also, don’t forget to Check out our mention here: Paying Attention Actually Pays. Neato.
“Taking Notes Beyond the Classroom”
Below are a few highlights of the article:
Despite mixed reactions, note sharing has continued to grow in popularity. “Broadly, what we’re seeing is a trend in the increase of recognition that learning is collaborative. We’ve often treated what students do as private segments, they just go back to their dorms and study, when in fact they study together a lot,” said David Parry, assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas-Dallas. Parry is also part of McGraw-Hill’s Academic Advisory Committee. “We’ve seen Facebook and MySpace collaboration to share information. There are opportunities for [the note sharing] Web sites to play that role for students.”
“From our perspective, we see note sharing as evolving into a more collaborative community of notes, more real time discussion, students helping each other in more real time,” Sawtell said. “If other social networks should be taken as an example, that is what may ultimately play out.”
Another concern about online note sharing is the fear that it is essentially spoon-feeding material to students and propagating a culture of laziness. However, supporters of the sites say they attract ambitious students, rather than class skippers. Keith Hampson, director of digital education strategies at Toronto’s Ryerson University, who is also part of McGraw-Hill’s Academic Advisory Committee, said that his original sense of skepticism has dissipated. “The more I’ve looked into this, the more I realized that the people who are using [note sharing sites] are proactive students. They want to have their notes in their hands before they enter class, they may want two or three copies of those notes when studying for an exam.”
The article ends with the following statement from Dr. Keith Hampson:
“I think there’s a real divide in higher education as to how we ought to be teaching, how students ought to be learning,” Hampson said. However, he acknowledged that whichever direction education moves in, change is inevitable. “We are obviously moving towards a more active and collaborative style of learning. These social technologies and practices enable to us to do this on a much grander scale.”
GradeGuru made it to Mashable today!
LINK: “GradeGuru: Collaborative Note Sharing for College Students”
Author: Ben Parr
Check out what people are saying on Twitter following the post and join us in the conversation @gradeguru
UPDATE:
This comment was just posted on the Mashable by a student:
i’m a college student and i think it’s really helpful…i painstakingly take pages and pages of notes every class but sometimes the professor goes too fast and I miss the 3 or 4 sentences that just happen to be the most important part of the lecture. Or I’m trying to keep up & can’t read my writing. Or sometimes I just don’t understand why I wrote something down. My friends in my classes and I share our notes before exams because sometimes the way someone else wrote something down just makes more sense.
Also, after nearly every lecture when I come home and am reading over my notes there are always things that I need to know in more detail, or just need to hear it a different way to really get it, so I end up spending hours researching whatever the topic is online, and sorting through the thosands of articles in my school’s databases. Having one place where I can search for the topic will be really helpful to fill in the blanks that I might have in my notes.
I know my friends and I plan to use GradeGuru before finals to share our notes with eachother so we can save paper and not photocopy different pages for different people, etc.
Also, it’s a good place for me to STORE my notes…right now I have boxes and boxes of file folders overflowing.People who use GradeGuru maliously won’t get anything out of it in the end anyhow. I see people cheat in class all of the time and maybe that gets them a high A when I studied super hard and barely got a 90%. But when I have my MPH and then my Phd and they couldn’t even get into a good grad school….well, then cheating won’t seem to them like it was worth it.
During an interview about GradeGuru, Dr. Keith Hampson, founder of the Higher Education Management group, asked Emily Sawtell the following questions:
To read the responses to the interview questions, click the link below…
LINK: Higher Education Management Blog – Interview responses
Jane Hart, founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance featured GradeGuru on her blog, Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day. Jane’s blog features daily posts regarding e-learning technologies and is a wonderful resource for staying informed with the latest developments in the world of web 2.0 and education. Below is an excerpt from her post about GradeGuru:
“GradeGuru.com is a note sharing platform for college students to share notes, give each other feedback and engage in collaborative learning. We’re also providing students with cash and rewards for their notes because we believe students should earn for sharing their knowledge. Our vision is to create a community of students who can rely on each other for academic support – whether through the feedback they receive on the notes that they contribute, or the ability to download their peers’ notes for free. We are setting out to build a network where students can learn online in a way that is specific to their course at their university – the web 2.0 version of a study group. GradeGuru is a McGraw-Hill Education start-up that was developed based on extensive ethnographic research with students across the UK and US.”
Thanks Jane for your support in advancing open access learning!
In his post, Business Model: P2P Class Note, Dr. Keith Hampson, higher education director and founder of Higher Education Management blog/LinkedIn Group, discussed how GradeGuru stands to leverage the web to help students manage the traditional process of note sharing. Dr. Hampson provides a brief analysis of the higher education market and how note-sharing platforms might fit into the equation of standardized education.
“From a business perspective, the degree to which content in higher education is common across schools is of fundamental importance. If much of the content is generic (and/or students believe it is generic), then it is possible to offer content-based commercial services to the higher education market. It’s scalable, in other words.
The textbook industry has long relied on the significant degree of commonality in higher education curriculum. It is the basis of their business model. The first large textbook providers emerged in the 19th century when governments sought to standardize education; who can teach, what they teach, and so forth.”
About The Higher Education Management Group
Higher Education Management Group is a LinkedIn Group. Initiated in the summer of 2008, the group is for management professionals working in the higher education industry. HEM Group focuses on the people, organizations, and issues that operate at the intersection of business and higher education. The group offers opportunities for networking and information sharing. Members include consultants, industry research/analysts, vendors and managers in textbook publishing, technology, recruiting, colleges/universities, and development (fundraising) professionals.
Picture Credit: Erin Sunderland
NYULocal.com, a blog by NYU students that gets more hits than the NYU newspaper, recently provided a student perspective of GradeGuru at NYU:
“My roommate Lucie spent most of last night manically copying notes for a final today. Looking crazy-faced and muttering a little bit, she thrust at least ten pages– covered back and front– in my face, apparently expecting me to commiserate and make the whole wasting her life with anthropology work thing feel less terrible. All I could think, though was what a waste, she’s just going to trash those notes in twelve hours, possibly even burn them in some sort of useless gesture of finality. Irony of all ironies, Under the Button posted about their test run of GradeGuru.com that very day. The site pays for your class notes based on their user popularity and it’s possible to get up to 50 sets of notes before you even register. So while it may sound ridiculous to pay $50,000 a year only to skip class and buy a stranger’s notes, when you’re waking up at the ass crack of dawn for a core requirement, I’m pretty sure that GradeGuru will start to feel a little less reprehensible.”
LINK: http://nyulocal.com/on-campus/2008/11/25/gradegurucom-get-paid-for-note-taking/
After learning about GradeGuru on The Daily Pennsylvanian, the editors of U.Penn’s popular gossip and entertainment blog, underthebutton.com, decide to take a test run of GradeGuru to see what all the fuss was about. Underthebutton provides a great student perspective of GradeGuru…
“When we opened the DP yesterday and read about the opportunity to get paid for note-taking, we were thrilled. After all, once we’re done with a final, we dump all of the semester’s information out of our brains to make room for the next set of classes. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were rewarded long after our blue-books were handed in (you can say what you want about learning being its own reward; we’d rather have cold, hard cash)? Besides, since my degree will likely only prepare me for a career as a secretary, this would be great to list as relevant work experience.
But more than that, I was also excited that GradeGuru.com would help me with my econ problem. Okay, full disclosure: I have many econ problems, but the one that I’m most concerned about is my inability to concentrate at 10 a.m. during a class I abhor so wholeheartedly. My notes mostly consist of random graphs and doodles, plus some indecipherable words and equations. Clearly the best method to a good GPA.”
LINK: http://underthebutton.com/2008/11/we-test-drive-gradegurucom/
