“I personally — and the Berkman Center in general — are pretty big on open access to knowledge,” says Phil Malone, who teaches a Cyberspace in Court freshman seminar in Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and is one of the nine professors who agreed to have a student blog about his course during the fall semester. Malone says he watched with interest the development of OpenCourseWare at MIT — which today publishes 1800 courses’ worth of material through a noncommercial Creative Commons license, and receives about 800,000 to a million unique visitors per month — and was sympathetic with the Final Club’s vision.
While Magliozzi and Bacrania admit they drew inspiration from OpenCourseWare, their goal is not exactly the same. Nor does Final Club, despite its for-profit status, share its mission with other note-taking companies that seek to dumb-down classes and sell educational material. Instead, it might be said that they seek to enhance Harvard course information.
“Students have an important contribution to the open educational resources movement,” says Steve Carson, the external relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare and an admirer of the Final Club. “I would hope that this would inspire [Harvard] to get more involved in open education.”
The majority of MIT’s material — aside from a selection of class notes they pay students to take and then publish with permission — is faculty-created, with a faculty perspective in mind. Final Club, for the most part, is by students, for students.
Rather than posting a straightforward syllabus, class handouts, or lecture videos — which is the model the OpenCourseWare Consortium follows — the Final Club’s model is looser, more free-flowing, with the student perspective controlling much of its content. Colloquial language, mini-digressions, and Stephen Colbert videos transform what could otherwise be a bare-bones rehashing of an outline into something highly readable.
“What makes the Final Club different from these open-course-ware initiatives . . . is its emphasis on interaction,” says Sarah Zhang, a freshman who is blogging Robert Darnton’s The Book: From Gutenberg to the Internet seminar. “Lectures, whether in real life or on video, don’t encourage interaction — you’re supposed to passively receive the material. The Final Club is specifically set up to encourage discussion and debate.”
“It’s about standing on the shoulders of giants,” says Magliozzi. “That’s the spirit of this project, and I think a lot of professors have come to understand that.”
Intellectual-property protection
It wasn’t always that way. When the Final Club initially launched, classes were blogged without the professor’s consent, which called into question the violation of intellectual property, since professors own the right to their lectures, as well as any replications.
Magliozzi and Bacrania eventually contacted each of those professors, explaining they wanted to publish posts that function more like essays than derivative works. And so their project was allowed to continue.
“I know Jay and Drew, and they’re very smart, capable guys who want to broaden education in the public realm, and bring a little bit of Harvard’s education and other kinds of elite education to a broader public,” says Timothy McCarthy, a lecturer on history and literature at the Kennedy School of Government who teaches the American Protest Literature class with John Stauffer, and is one of the site’s champions on the Harvard faculty.
“I don’t heavily police or guard my intellectual property. Obviously I’m happy to ‘own’ the kinds of things I say in public. But I’m a public intellectual. I lecture widely, I blog, I publish quite a bit, and I talk a lot. I’m interested in getting whatever I have to offer out to the broadest possible public.”
That said, “If these profs are consenting to recordation or consenting to abstraction, they’re giving up their common-law copyright.”
Students, NYU’s Miller cautions, are also still at risk for violating Harvard’s rules.
“It will be interesting to see, ultimately, what Harvard’s policy might be,” he says. “Promotion of education, if that’s the bottom line here — distribution of ideas, concepts, doctrines, that’s all superb. But you would think — if it’s being peddled in any way that is suggesting it’s Harvard authorized or in a sense the equivalent of a Harvard education — Harvard has had a long tradition of protecting its brand, so there are issues there.”
One big classroom
This isn’t Magliozzi and Bacrania’s first campus-oriented business venture. They are also co-owners of the Harvard Square tutoring company Veritas Tutors, which specializes in individual-subject tutoring, standardized-test prep, and admissions consulting. But the Final Club is their pet project.
The pair have spent months consulting with a programmer on the site’s design, seeking professors’ permission, working out the terms of fair use for the essays they publish, and discussing ways to make their interface acceptable to the largest possible audience. Not to mention taking on a serious financial investment: “At this point,” says Bacrania “we’re fully paying for the whole thing out of our own pockets.”
The Final Club is currently receiving 1000 unique visitors per week, but its founders have placed a huge amount of faith in seeing the experiment to its logical conclusion. They recently added an application that allows anyone to read the site on an iPod or iPhone, and they’re still hunting for new classes to blog, and more professors to bring over to their side.
“Education happens wherever people are busy trying out ideas,” “Fauxneme” says via e-mail. “Posting these blogs is a way to give these lectures to thousands of people who don’t have the privilege to be there in the first place.”
Magliozzi ultimately hopes to have every single class blogged — and not just at Harvard. “Then you could do really interesting things, so it’s not only about what Stephen Greenblatt is saying about Shakespeare, it’s about what Harold Bloom is saying at Yale, or what a professor at Stanford is saying,” he says. “Then you could have an intercollegiate discussion. There was a time when Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were public intellectuals. Maybe we should do that again.”