With increasing technology enabling students to get class notes off the World Wide Web and note-taking services available, Iowa State faculty have mixed opinions on whether the notes help students understand material or deter them from coming to class.

Barbara Mack, associate professor of journalism and mass communication, explained that there are several lawsuits currently going on to determine the fate of intellectual copyright, or if a professor’s lectures are his or her own property and cannot be marketed without permission.

Mack, who has notes for two of her journalism classes, JLMC 101 and JLMC 460, available at Notes, 111 Lynn Ave., and at StudentU.com, www.studentu.com, said she doesn’t have a problem with those services, as long as they act as a supplement to education instead of a substitute.

Palmer Holden, professor of animal science, doesn’t have a problem with students buying notes if it’s going to help them learn.

“If a student can go someplace else and get a better set of notes, then I’m all for it,” said Holden, who also is the at-large senator for the College of Agriculture in the Faculty Senate.

He added that he isn’t too sure about the concept of intellectual property.

“I can see that a professor’s lecture notes are his property, but what he says in class and what a student takes notes on becomes a student’s property,” he said.

Holden also said downloading notes from the Internet or buying notes from a note-taking service can’t compare to actually attending class regularly.

“There’s more to a good lecture than notes, that you try and copy the best you can and sell those notes, but it’s not the same input that you get from coming to class,” he said.

Chris Schilling, associate professor in materials science and engineering, said the debate over online and purchased notes hasn’t affected him yet, but he’s concerned about the increase in distance-education learning and other technological advancements in education, which he believes are beneficial to students.

“With younger students, the college experience is more than just learning calculus; there’s a social side of it, so the face-to-face contact with other students is really important, and the personal interactions with the professor, that’s really important.”

However, Dorothy Schweider, university professor of history, said she’s vehemently against the selling of notes, whether from an online service or from a note-taking service, because she believes it discourages students from coming to class.

“I feel it’s very unfair that any person can send someone, or I guess it’s hiring a student who’s already in the class, to take notes in the class. … I think this is wrong, and the teachers have no choice in the matter.

“Someone who, from my point of view, is doing no work whatsoever or contributing to the quality of the class, that that person can make a profit off of the labor of someone else, I think that’s wrong,” she said.

Schweider said she can see the other side of the argument — that some students use notes just as a helpful supplement rather than a substitute for going to class — but she’s not convinced that note-taking services don’t discourage students from attending classes.

She believes that convenience will lead students to “ask that, ‘Why do I need to bother [going to class]?’ So they don’t.”

“This argument is that it really helps the students stay away from class,” Schweider said.