You no longer have to open a book or attend a lecture to pass major subjects if you don’t want to. Websites such as Stuvia, studeersnel, SILverslagen and JoHO offer a veritable plethora of lecture summaries, books and even old exams that students put up for sale. And the digitalisation of education has only made this easier: lectures can be viewed online at any time and the slides are simply available for download.
This has also caught the attention of Elena Bondarouk, lecturer in public administration. It is a thorn in her side: she regularly finds summaries on websites in which students have copied the slides of her lectures or her lecture notes word for word. ‘If it’s not for sale, I don’t really have a problem with it. But when others have to pay money to students for things that were said by me, I find it immoral.’
Public administration lecturer Toon Kerkhoff shares this view. ‘I study all the articles; I turn them into a single story with a central thread and give all kinds of examples. That takes a lot of work; you spend years perfecting it. It’s mine, and when I put it online for my students, that’s fine. But then, someone simply plucks it out of the air and offers it for money.’
MORALLY AND LEGALLY QUESTIONABLE
The problem is also present in other faculties, but not all lecturers are equally concerned. Psychology lecturer Roy de Kleijn thinks it is ‘morally and legally questionable’, but is not too bothered by it himself.
‘I already get paid for all the effort, and there are 400 people who watch it anyway. All lectures are available online so if lecture notes were to be sold, it would be to people outside the university. I can imagine better ways to spend your time but if people really want to do that: be my guest. As for exam questions or old exams, I would consider it a problem. Fortunately, I’ve never come across those online’.
Bondarouk is a Faculty Council member of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs, where she raised the problem a number of times during the meeting. ‘The response is that there is nothing we can do about it. But surely, something must be possible?'
That is true, copyright expert Erna Sattler agrees, because legally, Bondarouk is in the right: ‘as a matter of fact, students are only allowed to sell material to which they have copyright, i.e., what they have created themselves. They are allowed to sell their own notes, but not if they contain slides. The copyright on these slides belongs to the university, because the lecturers created them in the course of their duties. This also applies to exams.’
The solution may seem simple, but it is very time-consuming, Sattler says. ‘As an individual lecturer, you can usually fill out a contact form on the website where you find the summary or the exam in question, and ask them to remove it. However, the university should take a centralised approach to solving this issue. In fact, all these websites should be tackled collectively, by all the universities together. But then again, who has time for that? Of course, condoning this behaviour leads to a policy of toleration. In any case, it would certainly be a good thing if this was given some thought at a central level.’
In 2015, a number of political science lecturers took matters into their own hands and made SIL withdraw summaries from their website. But that was just a drop in the ocean – and now, political science summaries are being sold in great numbers again.
According to university spokesperson Caroline van Overbeeke, the university has written to several websites in the past, and they complied. ‘However, after a while, the materials were being offered for sale again. We will continue to contact these sales sites.’
EDUCATIONALLY DISADVANTAGEOUS
Bondarouk also tried this once by approaching the authors themselves. ‘I don’t know where to report it, so it’s up to me to say: guys, you can’t do this. If a name is provided, I directly send an email to the student, but I don’t think it’s my job to do so; I’m not a police officer. There is no monitoring at all. What does this mean for the quality of the education we provide?’
For Kerkhoff, this is the main argument for banning summaries: educationally, it is very disadvantageous. He notices this problem in his own courses. ‘By just reading summaries, students lose academic skills. It works for a while; it helps you pass your exams. But eventually, you’ll run into problems if you haven’t learned to distinguish between key topics and secondary topics, e.g., when you have to write a thesis but you’ve never read a book before.’
‘Students are less inclined to attend lectures and some of them only start studying when those summaries are available. They do nothing for seven weeks and then learn the summaries by heart two weeks beforehand.’
He is particularly bothered by study associations that also sell summaries. ‘They think they’re helping students by doing that. When I was a study coordinator, I tried to talk to the study associations, but as an individual lecturer, there’s not much you can do. It feels like fighting a losing battle.’
Victor Gijsbers, lecturer for the humanities core curriculum Philosophy of science, sees things very differently. Maybe it is not the summaries, but the lectures that need changing, he thinks.
‘Apparently, you can pass your exams with these summaries, so it is only right that students make use of them. This gives the lecturer time to think: how can I reorganise my lectures in such a way that they are more beneficial to the students?
‘The learning strategy where students come to lectures and then start cramming is already something we’re trying to get rid of. It may be due to Covid-19 but I’ve already made the switch myself.
‘If there is something I want to share, a section of a lecture, for instance, I record it and I make it available online. That leaves more time during the actual lectures for interaction, discussions and asking questions. It’s a different way of engaging with the subject matter.’