Wuolah, the marketing platform for university notes that worries teachers | Education

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– Wuolah (@Wuolah) March 15, 2021

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Ruiz sees “understandable” that someone gets angry if its contents are used, but insists that they are anecdotal cases and there are more robberies between students than from students to teachers. Complaints from different faculties have reached the legal services of the Autonomous University of Madrid, and that is why last March they contacted Cedro (Spanish Center for Reprographic Rights), highlighted from the press department. The communication services of the universities of Seville, Complutense and Malaga also confirm that they have received complaints from their teaching staff that are resolved by talking to the company. “Teachers are reassured when they see that things are often uploaded due to ignorance. Most of them do it to help, not for money ”, says Ruiz, who assures that“ some teachers also upload content ”.

Authorship problems

Javier Díaz de Olarte, head of Cedro’s legal department, believes that in the preparation and, above all, subsequent distribution and commercialization of the notes, there may be an infringement of intellectual property, since the class is a work that corresponds to the teacher, who he is its author, and the student acts only as a mere copyist, “a stenographer from before.” What he does not doubt is that a breach is incurred when the cover, the index or a chapter of a book is uploaded to that web page. They violate the law, in their opinion, the student and the platform that they want to obtain economic benefit. Ruiz emphasizes that as soon as a case is detected, they react as required by law. “YouTube also removes content,” he recalls.

“It is a very suggestive page, but it can become a minefield. It seems very collaborative but there are losers. The teacher strives to improve the classes, to introduce new references … ”, continues Díaz de Olarte. “A culture of intellectual property is lacking. There is no infringement when one takes advantage of the creativity of others because it is something immaterial ”. Cedro has for 15 years a program for schoolchildren to learn to respect copyrights, called Es de Libro. 34,900 adolescents and 3,700 teachers have already passed through it.

A professor of letters at the University of Seville, from anonymity, ironically over the phone: “Do students earn money with our notes and we don’t? ”. He explains that he has stopped delivering the PowerPoint presentations of his classes. “If they sell them, unless they do it and take notes. My time and work have cost me ”, he reflects.

Yiyi López Gándara, who trains future English teachers at the University of Seville, has been worried about the Woulah platform for years, but says it is not supported by the campus or by employers. Every time he finds notes or other materials of his, he takes action. “The problem is that there is no legal mechanism to prevent it from happening. If you want to report, you have to go document by document, put the name of the file, the person who uploaded it … and they remove it, ”he says. The problem is less, he assures, with the master’s students: “They have another perspective, as they have done a final degree project, they know what copyright is, to cite the sources …”.

López Gándara believes that this platform does not influence his evaluation. “There has always been a market for notes. I evaluate by competences, with work, presentations, activities … ”. Although he does believe that it can encourage dropouts in classes in which memory tests are proposed. “Although with the same notes one can get a 0 and another a 10,” he warns.

Woulah’s next step is to expand throughout Latin America, say its owners, who are also planning a crowdfunding, or crowdfunding campaign among students to make them participate in a project that they want to be collaborative.

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