Course Hero took over Lumen Art course?

[naomitr...@gmail.com]

Hi OER Friends! 

Our Art faculty alerted me to her Lumen Learning Art courses now being redirected to Course Hero. LL doesn't list any Art courses anymore... (The SUNY version is still active, so that's our current solution). 

Did Course Hero buy LL's Art content? 

What the heck?

Naomi 

[Jennifer Pakula]

Very curious about this too! I was prepping Summer courses and noticed that all my links to Lumen Learning are now going to Course Hero... 

Jennifer Pakula

Associate Professor
Chair of Economics Department

Co-Chair of Political Science Department

Co-Chair of OER/ZTC Work Group
Saddleback College

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Subject: Course Hero took over Lumen Art course?

 

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[Andrew Park]

I don't know whose bright idea it was, but if Course Hero wants to get into legitimate course material hosting business, they'll have to change their name (or at least their domain name).

P.S. If you have old URLs hosted at Lumen Learning, you may be able to put it into web.archive.org to see the version that was on Lumen (e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20220315065501/https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sac-artappreciation/).

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[Delmar Larsen]

In case people are interested, we (LibreTexts) harvested many of Lumen's texts a few years ago

https://human.libretexts.org/Courses/Lumen_Learning/

although we haven't go through to clean up the code much. This book (I think) is this one:

https://human.libretexts.org/Courses/Lumen_Learning/Book%3A_Art_Appreciation_(Lumen)

Cheers,

Delmar

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[pamratvasky]

 I was in contact last summer with a Lumen Learning rep, I found the email info,  if you want to check with them directly.  

MAXIM ASHER YOUNG | BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT REPRESENTATIVE | LUMEN LEARNING

407-885-0725 | ma...@lumenlearning.com | www.lumenlearning.com

Schedule a Meeting

Pam Ratvasky, Ph.D.

OER Instructional Designer

North Central State College

2441 Kenwood Circle

Mansfield, OH 44906​

prat...@ncstatecollege.edu

614-946-0843 (cell)

[Alan Levine]

It seems random. I got really curious.

SUNY Art History 1 Course is still on Lumen https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-arthistory1/

SAC ART 100 Apperciation redirects to Course Hero https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sac-artappreciation/

as does a few math courses

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sanjacinto-collegemath-1

and intro to Psychology

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wmopen-psychology/chapter/introduction-9/

Hmmmm

[Stacy Katz]

A faculty member emailed me today that his also redirects to CourseHero. He was pretty upset (though I think will migrate the content to Pressbooks or Manifold for future updates). Any intel would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Stacy

Stacy Katz

Assistant Professor, Open Resources Librarian-STEM Liaison

Lehman College

stacy...@lehman.cuny.edu

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To: CCCOER Community Email <cccoer-...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: Course Hero took over Lumen Art course?

 

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[Jennifer Pakula]

I emailed Lumen directly.  This was the response:

Hi Jennifer,

Lumen has partnered with Course Hero to host the content of our community created course, that includes our all of our Art courses .From here on out, Course Hero will be hosting the courses you were linking to. You are welcome to continue linking to it. 

Please let me know if you have any questions!

All the Best,

Maxim

Maxim Asher Young

Director of Learning Solutions | Lumen Learning

Schedule a Meeting | (407) 885-0725

Jennifer Pakula

Associate Professor
Chair of Economics Department

Co-Chair of Political Science Department

Co-Chair of OER/ZTC Work Group
Saddleback College

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[Andrew Park]

Thank you for sharing, Jennifer.

BTW, are there any Lumen folks on CCCOER list? I know some are on CC-OpenEdu list (but I don't know if the folks I have seen on CC-OpenEdu are also on CCCOER). If they didn't know already, they should know that there are higher-ed institutions that block websites like Course Hero and Chegg because they facilitate activities seen as academic dishonesty. Material hosted using Course Hero domain is automatically less valuable to the OER community ... although I guess it's an open question of "by how much" (enough to change Lumen's business decisions? not sure).

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[Catherine Lee]

I have found the same course direct with some Lumen English materials. I will not be recommending that material to my English instructors any more if it's hosted on the Course Hero domain.

Catherine A. Lee

Dean, Learning Resource Center

Cape Fear Community College

Wilmington, NC 28401

910-362-7033

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[Shauna Roch]

We discovered this issue as well last week, and have tried to go back and change all of our links to the LibreText versions (where available).  Perhaps for those courses still on Lumen, and not in Libre Texts, a course import into Pressbooks might be a good idea. The Lumen Learning import into Pressbooks works very well - better than other sites. We could most likely assist with some of this work in our studio. Maybe we could start a list of all of the books?  Just a thought. 

Shauna Roch

OER Design Studio

Fanshawe College 

[DeFranco, Tony]

Hi folks. The SUNY content is not part of the Course Hero arrangement, which is why the Art History course does not redirect to the Course Hero site.

 

 

Tony DeFranco

Director of Operations

SUNY OER Services

oer.suny.edu

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[Kelly Gillerlain]

All,

We were told that Lumen sold all their content/courses to Course Hero. If you pay them for Waymaker, the assessments are not available on Course Hero. 

Best,

Kelly

Kelly Gillerlain, Ph.D, MBA

Professor of Business, Management, & Marketing 

Tidewater Community College 

Pass Building - 2050

1428 Cedar Road

Chesapeake, VA 23320

757/822-5159

On Jun 15, 2022, at 9:06 AM, Shauna Roch <sr...@fanshawec.ca> wrote:

 We discovered this issue as well last week, and have tried to go back and change all of our links to the LibreText versions (where available).  Perhaps for those courses still on Lumen, and not in Libre Texts, a course import into Pressbooks might be a good idea. The Lumen Learning import into Pressbooks works very well - better than other sites. We could most likely assist with some of this work in our studio. Maybe we could start a list of all of the books?  Just a thought. 

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[Jennifer Rogers]

Hi Everyone,

I'd like to reiterate what Delmar mentioned a few replies back. LibreTexts can, and would be happy to import any Lumen content not already available in our platform and provide stable URLs for linking to said content. The LibreTexts team believes very strongly in the mission of open education and we do not put OER behind paywalls. 

Please feel free to contact me directly with any questions/concerns you might have. 

Take care,

Jennifer Rogers 

LibreTexts Outreach Coordinator 

jro...@libretexts.org 

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Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2022 7:21 AM
To: Shauna Roch <sr...@fanshawec.ca>
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Subject: Re: [External Sender] Re: [External] Re: Course Hero took over Lumen Art course?

 

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[Alan Levine]

Thanks for all the responses here and as well to the original question from Naomi that started all this. Thanks as well Jennifer and Delmar from LibreTexts for being proactive too. 

Do not listen to any advice suggesting settling for links to Course Hero or suggesting faculty figure out how to export content from Course Hero and build them in Blackboard. That is more than ludicrous.

I've been talking to Delmar and he assures me that they already have the content for a significant number of Lumen courses (see example Chemistry ones) and they are active working to make all of them available in a collection. He is confident that likely have all the ones now redirected to Course Hero, and if not, can retrieve them manually. 

Expect an update in a few days from Delmar and there is no reason to try to figure out how to free your content from Course Hero- Libretexts is on it. We know who the heroes are.

regards,

Alan

[Joanne Spadaro]

This is all so troubling about Lumen "partnering" with Course Hero.  Perhaps I missed it, but a heads-up from Lumen would have been appreciated.    

Joanne Spadaro 

Open Educational Resources Librarian

SUNY Old Westbury Library

516.876.2896

Open Educational Resources LibGuide  

(http://libguides.oldwestbury.edu/oer)

"Inclusive access is like leasing fire extinguishers from a serial arsonist"  -- Rajiv Jhangiani 

​​

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Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2022 11:57 PM

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[Steel Wagstaff]

Hi all,

I've received several concerned messages about this privately in the past few days as well. I have written to Kim Thanos and David Wiley at Lumen Learning for more clarity and have waited to reply to this thread until I had accurate information directly from the principals involved. I'm not 100% on everything that follows, but here's what I believe to be the case (I've tried to provide sources and flag the boundaries of my knowledge):

1. Lumen Learning recently received a large grant from the Gates Foundation to focus on improving educational outcomes for underserved students (https://lumenlearning.com/new-statistics/)

2. Lumen Learning historically maintained a very large catalog of openly licensed content. Per an email response from Kim, they have divided this content into two types: 1) content that they "actively support through courseware and updates" (I think this means these courses: https://lumenlearning.com/courses/) and 2) "community OER courses" -- which Lumen hosts/used to host but does not actively update or provide support for.

3. In light of their Gates grant, Lumen has decided to stop hosting these 'community OER courses' and focus on the smaller number of courses that they are 'actively supporting'. Per an email response from Kim, rather than continuing to host these community OER courses, they have entered into a business arrangement which will result in CourseHero taking over hosting of these community OER courses.

4. Lumen appears to have begun adding redirects from these courses' URLs so that they point directly to the content in CourseHero's platform rather than Lumen's self-hosted Pressbooks network. I don't know what kind of messaging, if any, was sent to the creators of these community OER courses. I have not seen any public communications about this from Lumen or from CourseHero. Per a message from Ed Beck at SUNY Oneonta, I believe that there was some kind of exception negotiated for courses developed by SUNY, though I don't know the details of this exception.

5. I think there are many of us in the community who would be willing to host (or continue to host) these community courses. Delmar and his team at LibreTexts definitely are, I know that we would be willing to host these books as a public good at Pressbooks, and I suspect the same is true of organizations/repositories like OER Commons or MERLOT.

Because these courses were originally built by Lumen using Pressbooks, it would be particularly easy for us to clone any/all of them into another Pressbooks instance with our existing cloning tool, provided that the Lumen hosted instances are still reachable on the public web. We did this a few years ago for more than a hundred books created by/for Achieving the Dream, for instance, and Kim and her team at Lumen Learning were very helpful and collaborative in this process (see https://library.achievingthedream.org/).

I'm waiting to hear from Lumen about whether these 'community OER courses' are still hosted on their self-hosted Pressbooks instance, and if so, whether they're willing to provide us with a list of affected courses/titles. If they are, we would be happy to provide an update about Pressbooks-hosted copies of these courses in the near future.

All best,

Steel Wagstaff
Product Manager, Pressbooks
st...@pressbooks.com

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[Joshua Halpern]

It would really speed up the process if people would say what books they are most interested. That would enable  us at LibreTexts (and elsewhere) to concentrate first on those. You can either reply here or send email to use at in...@libreTexts.org

I should also point out that OpenStax has moved its community books (CNX) to the internet archive. 

https://openstax.org/blog/saying-goodbye-cnx

Josh Halpern

jhal...@libretexts.org

[Sutton, Susan R]

Please read below what my colleague sent me about Lumen. This is from someone at Lumen. Scroll down to second email.

Namaste,
Susan

Susan Sutton, PhD
Director, Center for Teaching Arts & Technology & Distance Education
Accessibility Chair
D2L Certified Administrator
Roane State Community College
Office - 865-882-4658
Cell - 812-459-3982
E-mail: sutt...@roanestate.edu<mailto:sutt...@roanestate.edu>

“Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care.”

-- Gen Collin Powell


From: Kathryn Rhodes <rhod...@roanestate.edu>
Date: Friday, June 17, 2022 at 9:46 AM
To: Parishweta Bhatt <parishwe...@tbr.edu>
Cc: Nicola Wayer <NWa...@tbr.edu>, Susan Sutton <sutt...@roanestate.edu>, 'Natalie Chakrian' <nat...@lumenlearning.com>, Paul Golisch <pa...@lumenlearning.com>
Subject: RE: [External Sender] Re: [External] Re: Course Hero took over Lumen Art course?

Thanks for clarifying with Lumen for me. Have a great weekend! ;-)


Kathryn Rhodes, Retired Dean of Student Academic Services
Adjunct Faculty, Business & Management
Roane State Community College
Social Sciences, Business & Education
(865) 354-3000
rhod...@roanestate.edu<mailto:rhod...@roanestate.edu>

From: Natalie Chakrian <nat...@lumenlearning.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2022 10:08 AM
To: Parishweta Bhatt <parishwe...@tbr.edu>; Paul Golisch <pa...@lumenlearning.com>
Cc: Nicola Wayer <NWa...@tbr.edu>; Rhodes, Kathryn <rhod...@roanestate.edu>; Sutton, Susan R <sutt...@roanestate.edu>
Subject: Re: [External Sender] Re: [External] Re: Course Hero took over Lumen Art course?

Hi Pari,

Thanks for reaching out. Anyone using Waymaker or OHM or a course from our Lumen created catalog<https://lumenlearning.com/courses/> will not be impacted. It will be the usual process. Please let us know if you are seeing some sort of Course Hero redirect in your courses, but this should not be happening.

Those that are impacted are faculty that are using something called OER community courses that Lumen historically hosted on our website, but were not actually our courses. Hosting the number of open content collections (e.g. Boundless) Lumen has been hosting for the past 10 years has very complex requirements, so these are being redirected to Course Hero because they have the technical ability to migrate and host thousands of collections and support the significant global web traffic of those using the collections. They are also able to provide free, unfettered access to the content and support the licensing requirements of the OER.

I've copied in my VP of Customer Experience if you have any additional questions. :)

Thanks,
Natalie
Natalie Chakrian

Sr. Director of Teaching and Learning

Lumen Learning




[Image removed by sender.]


240 393 1459<tel:240+393+1459>

[Image removed by sender.]


lumenlearning.com<https://lumenlearning.com/>




See Our Courses<https://lumenlearning.com/courses>




On Thu, Jun 16, 2022 at 1:01 AM Parishweta Bhatt <parishwe...@tbr.edu<mailto:parishwe...@tbr.edu>> wrote:
Hello Natalie,

What are the implications of Lumen courses being sold to CourseHero (see emails below from our concerned faculty who are already thinking about Fall 22)? How will our faculty/integration process be impacted?

Are there new guides/help docs for our faculty or us on the integration process? Is there a new point of contact from CourseHero that we need to be in touch with moving forward?

Please advise,
~ Pari.

Parishweta Bhatt, MS, MBA, CPACC
Senior Instructional Designer, TN eCampus
TBR – The College System of Tennessee
pbh...@tbr.edu<mailto:pbh...@tbr.edu> (best way to reach me!)
Phone: 615-366-4485 (for voice message)

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[Alan Levine]

I find it telling that this story "broke" here five days ago, has spread to social media, people as asking Lumen for an explanation, and what is their public response?

These emails from Lumen to questions are disturbing. Okay, they had a pile of "something called OER community courses" that were too complex to keep hosting? Weren't they just Pressbooks or HTML? How complex is that? Where is the source?

If they could not host it (and the cited reasons are a veil of smoke), where did they put out a call to the "community" to help? Pressbooks and Libretexts seem capable of supporting it, and there are more than enough professional archivists who would have helped. How was it Course Hero was the only option?

And since these were courses "Lumen historically hosted on our website, but were not actually our courses" what about the rights of the creators of these courses? All five of their Rs have been negated and the only right left is the right to link to a questionable operator.

This is more than open washing it is open flushing.

Keep asking. 

[Billy C Meinke]

This is such an interesting thing to watch.

Some observations:

• Many people are surprised at Lumen Learning's flushing of OER
• The "community OER courses" were definitely useful to Lumen at some point, but appear to no longer be
• There was little or no broad notice of the change, or requests for assistance from Libretexts, Pressbooks, etc
• Lumen Learning is not compelled to respond to community concerns about their practices

If representatives of Lumen Learning are no longer on this mailing list, OK, but I imagine there are folks who are simply staying quiet.

Their silence is pretty loud, though.

I applaud efforts to scrape (if not export) OER content that Lumen is flushing, and wonder what the next startling event will be.

And I encourage folks to revisit this (3 year old!) post about fettering OER. Maybe we shouldn't be so surprised.

Billy

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University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

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[Susan Jones]

Following Course Hero through the years has been interesting too (friend of mine briefly worked for them a while back). 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cccoer-advisory/CAF7Nzjnom9e5qM-qZYV7zF%3DEA5grc5QQgbuSt9jYdJxJckg9HQ%40mail.gmail.com.

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[Alan Levine]

The same boatload of "Lumen community courses" are now also "free courses" on Quillbot https://quillbot.com/courses/ 

No surprise  https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/quillbot

[Joshua Halpern]

I believe we are looking at this from the wrong end

In December 2021 CoruseHero got $380 million funding from a venture capitalist group lead by Wellington Management and NewView Capital. That sort of investment is not a long term thing but point to an immediate plan to transform a sector and we are the sector. As this was a private placement I can't find the prospectus, but it would be extremely interesting as would any presentation materials from 

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/accelerating-its-vision-to-enrich-learning-experiences-course-hero-inc-raises-380m-series-c-301444320.html

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coursehero/company_financials

From the OER POV quillbot (August 2021) and the takeover of Lumen Learning;s Community OER is perhaps the first indication, but more is coming and the basic question is where is CourseHero going to spend the money. That spend is going to have a major effect on global education and not necessarily a good one.

[Susan Jones]

I think you are right. It does seem they're looking to capitalize on All Things Scalable.  I'm recalling when K12  in 1999 or so made big investments to be cradle-to-grave online learning provider.

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[Liz Yata]

Hi everyone,

I don't know how many of you saw this, but in the latest OER Digest they linked to an article by EdSurge that references this email thread: Course Hero Quietly Took Over Hosting Lumen’s OER Content. They Say It’s No Big Deal

-Liz

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Liz Yata (she/her)

Manager of Communities of Practice, Open Education Global

liz...@oeglobal.org | CCCOER.org | Twitter: @CCCOER 

OEGlobal, CCCOER | 60 Thoreau St, Suite 238, Concord, MA 01742 USA

Connect with the global Open Education community at https://connect.oeglobal.org/ 

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[Alan Levine]

Thanks for sharing this link Liz. If anyone knows of a good OER on the basics of investigative journalism, please send it to this Edsurge reporter, because this article is devoid of any investigative information beyond quoting emails from PR departments.

Also, note the referral to the source of where this story emerged, here as a CCCOER discussion, and quotes are attributed to merely as "Message in an OER Google Group", did anyone here get contacted by the author, Daniel Mollenkamp?

Actually I did. He asked me for a "take" on this story. I referred to him to what I had already blogged and the CCCOER email discussion that had a lot of information and contacts. This story was not about me; and I said I hoped he could get information directly from Lumen and Course Hero. This is what he surfaced.

It “doesn’t strike us as especially newsworthy,” a representative from Course Hero said via email when asked why notice of the deal wasn’t sent to the community, though the spokesperson said they will “find an optimal time to share the resources with our users if and when appropriate.”

The information from Lumen said it was too much of a burden for them to host content that generated millions of hits but apparently was spread to thin for their interests. So the burning question one might ask is, if your company has a large archive of OER "community courses" that you do not want support, might you put out a call to the education community to ask who might be willing to take on a stewardship role? After extensive effort, Lumen concluded that the best steward for this content was Course Hero? Really? 

The reporter also missed in this email threaded the repeated pattern of Lumen reps providing questionable advice to faculty who asked about getting access to what was Lumen hosted OER, you know one of those 5R things.

These companies are hiding behind silence and just counting on all of you just shrugging and moving on to other things. If I have missed a statement or an announcement please let me know.

Do not roll over. I would hope more people would press Lumen and Course Hero to explain. Otherwise their big deal is no big deal. 

[Naomi Toftness]

Hi! I started this thread (and was one of the quotes in the Edsurge article). I was never contacted for permission to be quoted.

Naomi 

[Billy C Meinke]

Naomi, sorry to hear that your expectations around being contacted (which is what I assume you mean by permission) before being quoted were not met. The article was very lazy.

Course Hero's platformness assumes that more traffic will yield the network effects it desires. By redirecting links from Lumen's sites to CH, CH gains many many users who even if they are not logged into CH now, very easily can be and perhaps will also become paying customers. All the while CH will collect data about visitors, users, etc which it can leverage in the advertising market. This was not the simple "same content at a different web address" transition some would like us to believe. This is not the OER you were looking for.

If Lumen had a way to directly take advantage of the traffic it was experiencing, it would have (and it wouldn't be considered a burden!). But instead of becoming the kind of extractive, exploitative platform CH is, it simply made a deal to send users to them. A lesser evil, I suppose.

The only two parties for whom this transition needed to be equitable were CH and Lumen. Everything else is an afterthought, second-class considerations.

Very newsworthy stuff.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cccoer-advisory/a8b5ab1c-0a0d-4006-87b5-0e19ff8270a4n%40googlegroups.com.

[Alex Enkerli]

Is it wrong to feel some schadenfreude, in this case?

Chegg shares drop 40% after company says ChatGPT is killing its business (cnbc.com)

Of course, the company's pivoting towards their own GPT-based chatbot to help with feedback.

Chegg announces CheggMate, the new AI companion, built with GPT-4 | Business Wire

In such cases, content (open or not) might get relegated to an afterthought. Or it can become more tightly closed. Instead of paying for access to a whole textbook, learners end up paying for access to bits and pieces without the benefit of the whole material.

Our alternative, in Open Education, could be to provide direct access to the whole material... and the mechanisms by which it becomes adaptive. Some people on "our side" have been dreaming about such models. Of course, that doesn't mean we should all agree! In fact, identifying where our dreams differ could help us prevent "Open Washing" and "fauxpen".

So, Chegg may have taken over some useful content through its dealings with Lumen. Let's make sure they don't get in the way of learners and teachers.