In 2006, Andrew Grauer, then a student at Cornell University, founded Course Hero, a platform marketed as a means for students to share class notes and other educational materials. Over the years, Course Hero has grown into a player in the EdTech industry, boasting an extensive library of digitized educational content. While the platform presents itself as a learning resource for students, its business model relies heavily on leveraging the unpaid labor of teachers and students from public education institutions.
Course Hero’s website greets visitors with a promise: “Welcome to Course Hero — Tap into the brainpower of your brightest peers and professors. Discover the exact content you need, in a few clicks. Course-specific help. Textbook explanations. 100,000+ educators.” This extensive library of educational content drives traffic to the platform and encourages more users to join, upload more content, and even pay for it. In 2021, Course Hero was a darling of investors, an EdTech unicorn valued at $3.6 billion.
While educational content—PPT lectures, videos, study guides, take-home exams—is core to Course Hero’s value, it doesn’t pay anyone to produce any of it. Instead, Course Hero’s content comes from students enrolled in colleges and universities, who collect educational materials created by their professors and peers and transfer it into its coffers. Course Hero’s resulting online “library” of educational materials more akin to a privatized vault of intellectual property (IP) from which it extracts value. While corporations like Walt Disney must pay a workforce to create the movies and TV series it owns and rents out for a price, Course Hero’s content trove is produced by professors and students for free, but then made accessible to other platform users for a fee. Course Hero’s Basic Membership does not grant everyone access to all the content available on its platform; to “unlock up to 30 documents,” we must pay $29.95 a month for a Premier Membership. Course Hero profits from the labor of teachers and learners it does not pay for, effectively transforming educational resources made in the public system into a source of private capital accumulation.
Course Hero’s business model is a variant of “crowdsourcing,” a term coined by Jeff Howe in his 2006 Wired article. Howe posits that leading Internet companies are devising ways to mobilize and exploit the time, effort, and talent of billions of people without ever paying them. They use crowdsourcing to transform the unpaid labor of individual Internet users into valuable production inputs, thereby reducing labor costs for established corporations and providing cost-efficient opportunities for tech start-ups that either cannot or simply refuse to pay their workforce. Unlike the longstanding profit-maximization practice in capitalism where corporations downsize their local workforce and outsource tasks to lower-paid workers employed by contractor firms around the world, crowdsourcing distributes tasks from paid workers to a crowd of Internet users who, wittingly or unwittingly, work for free. As former Wired editor Chris Anderson says: “Users happily do for free what companies would otherwise have to pay employees to do.” Crowdsourcing has been employed by numerous corporations to tackle a range of tasks at little to no cost, serving their bottom line. As Trebor Scholz argues in the book Uberworked and Underpaid, “The productive power of the network [of unwaged users] becomes a dynamo for profits.”
Course Hero’s crowdsourcing business model turns professors and students around the world, including me and evidently one or more of my former students, into unpaid laborers for its profit. For the past seven years, I have been teaching an upper-year course on Digital Media Technology, Politics, and Democracy at Ontario Tech University. Every year, I share the educational materials I create with my students on my course website, free of charge. I do not assert copyright over my lecture notes, nor have I tried to commodify videos of my online lectures. I have never given anyone permission to sell or sell access to these educational materials. However, this has not stopped Course Hero from doing so, without my knowledge, until recently. I discovered 14 of my PPT slide decks (each with about 40 slides) for the course’s weekly modules enclosed within the Course Hero platform. When I attempted to view my own PPT slide deck for Lecture 4, which covers different ways of conceptualizing the politics and power relations of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, the Course Hero platform demanded that I pay a fee: $3.99 USD per month or $47.88 USD per year to access my own lecture notes!
But it is not only lecture notes that Course Hero is cashing in on. A few months ago, I noticed that a digital copy of my 2013 book Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization was on the Course Hero site, along with bunch of my journal articles and chapters. I went on Course Hero yesterday and tried to access an article I co-authored with my colleague Shahid Alvi back in 2014 in titled “Taylorizing Academia, Deskilling Professors and Automating Higher Education: The Recent Role of MOOCs.” I clicked on the article, and Course Hero swiftly delivered my eyes to another page, demanding I input my credit card information and pay a subscription fee to access my own article, which for the past decade, has been “open access” on the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS) website, where it was first published. Evidently, Course Hero commodifies access to educational content it does not even own, and that is freely available elsewhere. If I want to get my content removed from Course Hero, I must submit a Digital Millennium Copyright Compliant Takedown Request. That is tedious, but I’ll do it.
While I am not generally litigious about copyright, the blatant exploitation by Course Hero compels me to reconsider. The platform’s profiteering from public sector-produced content, all under the guise of democratizing education, is an affront to the academic community. This model not only commodifies but also undermines the very ethos of educational sharing and collaboration.
EdTech companies like Course Hero monetize the products of academic labor without compensation or permission. These companies extract educational content created within the public sector, repackaging it for profit under the guise of democratizing education. This exploitation of publicly funded academic labor for private gain is a practice that must be challenged to preserve the integrity of education and protect the rights of educators and students alike.
Tanner Mirrlees is an Associate Professor in the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at Ontario Tech University. Mirrlees is a member of the Tech Lobby Project and author of Work in the Digital Media and Entertainment Industries: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2024) and co-author of EdTech Inc.: Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2019).