Students can feel less guilty hitting the snooze button and missing class thanks to a new Web site that allows people across the country to search for lecture notes.
Ryan Sapp, a student athlete from the University of Dayton, launched a Web site called “I Slept Through Class” in September 2007 after having difficulty balancing his busy athletic schedule and his courses.
As a sophomore football player, he said he was forced to miss many classes due to practices and games and realized he was not alone in this predicament.
“I found that people really liked the idea and picked up on it,” Sapp said. “There’s a real need for it.”
Isleptthroughclass.com allows students to create an account and search for lecture notes from universities all over the United States for free, said Allison Barber, director of marketing for the site.
But students can also earn money towards Amazon.com gift cards for sharing their notes, with the site’s revenue being provided by online advertisements directed at the college student demographic, she said.
Sapp said the site is the latest addition to the list of college note sharing and networking sites popping up across the web and he hopes to set it apart from competing sites like varsitynotes.com and gradesaver.com by the value of its note content.
“We have the only business model where we award people for their notes,” Sapp said. “To really get high quality notes, we feel that those people need to be rewarded.”
Similar sites have received a lot of criticism that they may encourage students to skip class, Barber said. But this site combats the idea by rewarding students who attend class on a regular basis and take good notes.
“We’ve talked to a lot of professors about it and they are leery,” Barber said. “But a lot of students learn in different ways, it’s difficult for them to listen to the lecture and take notes at the same time.
School of Engineering sophomore Kyle Sherman recently became a member of the site so he could post notes for a few of his friends.
“[They] can see my typed notes I took in class in case they missed a few things in lecture,” Sherman said.
Sherman doesn’t think this site will promote students skipping class.
“I think that if someone is inclined to skip class, this may make it easier for them, but I think the way it should be used is if you are sick a day and miss lecture,” Sherman said. “This is no different from some professors putting notes online.”
Barber said this site has already grown in popularity across the nation’s colleges and universities.
”Now we’re at over 700 schools across the country,” she said. “Students love the site and they love being paid to be good students.”
The site has also established a point system to reward students for not only posting notes, but also inviting friends or writing on the site blog, Barber said.
“We try to make the site as user-friendly as possible,” Barber said. “It’s a lot more convenient and has a lot more choices for the users.”
Sapp said he has high hopes for the site’s future, which is currently running “Midterm Madness” that allows students to earn double the amount of points.
But his primary goal is to spread his Web site to other schools through student promotion.
“Obviously, being a school like Rutgers, we don’t have as many people there unfortunately,” Sapp said. “It takes time, but we’ve already seen enormous growth.”
Web site allows students to post, search free class notes
Published: Thursday, October 9, 2008
Updated: Thursday, October 9, 2008
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