News from Michael Rihani, co-founder of Koofers.com:
Here’s a quick description of our website, just so you know some more:
Koofers.com provides an interactive community that serves the academic needs of college students through information sharing. Students benefit from collaboration with their peers and the experiences of former students. Many helpful services span the entire academic calendar from course selection through final exams, and include collaborative note-taking, course and instructor ratings/grade distributions, and an online library for sharing past exams and study materials.
We started at Virginia Tech and have over 14,000 VT students using the website within our first year and a half in operation.
We just launched at the end of the school year at the University of Maryland, College Park and were featured on the front page of their school newspaper or you can see the newspaper article in "real newspaper" .pdf format.
In the first week, we received over 1,000 UMD students registering/using our service!
Koofers.com is a member company of high-tech business accelerator VT KnowledgeWorks, located at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center in Blacksburg, Virginia.
I learned about "koofers" as a freshman in 1951 at Va Tech. They were invaluable and passed from class to class within departments (before fraternities, etc.). Having served on honor code trials, I know the stresses on jurors and other students related to improper uses of these materials.
As a teacher at Va Tech I saved term papers and then handed them out to students 3-4 years later and assigned editing and updating of them. I considered this a lesson in conserving knowledge. I later added the edited papers to the Internet, giving students credit, at http://fwie.fw.vt.edu/rhgiles/speciesssm/index.htm. Maybe these are koofers?
Posted by: Robert Giles | June 05, 2008 at 09:00 AM