New Partnership Lets Instructors Pick Student To Sell Class Notes to Classmates
College instructors can now pick a Cengage Learning
Scholar to share their class notes and study materials with their fellow
classmates — for a price.
In an extension of an
existing partnership between Cengage
Learning and Flashnotes.com,
any college instructor using a Cengage Learning
product, like MindTap,
can recruit one student in each course to be responsible
for posting weekly summaries of the class work using notes, study
guides,
flashcards, video tutorials or live help on Flashnotes.com.
Other students can buy the study materials and the
appointed
student will receive 70 percent of each sale.
MindTap is Cengage's e-learning platform that
supplements a
college instructor's materials and lectures with interactive
assignments,
mobile apps and tools to help learn the course material more
effectively.
Flashnotes.com allows students to buy and sell learning materials and
study guides
from each other.
The two companies partnered with one another in
September 2014
to integrate Flashnotes.com's online marketplace with MindTap. The
latest
development encourages instructors to appoint a student to offer his or
her
study notes to classmates.
The instructor-appointed Cengage Learning Scholars
can set
their own prices for the materials. Flashnotes.com recommends study
guides be
priced between $1 and $2 per page and lecture notes or textbook notes
between
75 cents and $1.50 per page.
Arkansas Tech University instructor Carey Roberts
said of the
use of MindTap and Flashnotes.com, "Students' learning improved
dramatically,
and their grades improved by a full letter, from a C- average to a B-
average."
Cengage Learning Chief Product Officer Jim Donohue
said, "This
provides instructors with another tool that can close the gap between
the
material covered in class and the material students understand."
Company representatives said Flashnotes.com has a rigorous internal
review
process to insure materials offered for sale are original and employs
plagiarism detection software.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.