The year is 2024. Robots have breached Bellarmine Hall and the AI Lordship officially rules over Fairfield University. Well, maybe I’m being overdramatic. I don’t think we’re in danger of the Grub Hub robots and we’re hopefully not in The Matrix, but at a Jesuit school focused on being people for others, the reliance on AI instead of our peers is disheartening. With the Office of Accessibility’s (OOA) switch from peer notetaking to dependence on the AI-based program Glean, student learning and the classroom community suffer.
Fairfield isn’t the first to make the switch to Glean; colleges like Lakehead University in Canada, to Rutgers and Elon have all made the switch to AI notetaking services for students with learning dis/abilities. However, Rutger’s site still offers peer notetakers as an option. In an article introducing Glean, Fairfield offers reasoning for the switch: “Based on course design and the availability of several technology-based notetaking options, a peer notetaker may not be the most effective accommodation for a course.” The Mirror reached out to OOA for specific reasons as to the switch from student notetakers, but it did not respond in time for publication.
The Mirror reached a representative for Glean who declined to comment on the pricing for an institution of Fairfield’s size and directed the question to OOA. Even though institution pricing was not available on the website, the price for an individual yearly subscription is 129 dollars. When you do the math (note I am not a math major) hiring a student notetaker for one class for a full academic year would cost 1,098 dollars (minimum wage x 2.5 hours of class a week x 28 weeks of class). With the cost of a student Glean account worlds less than paying a notetaker, Glean ensures that the books stay in the green.
From an economic standpoint, purchasing Glean makes sense. Given the University’s towering school of business and attempts to milk the student body of every penny they have, the choice they’ve made makes sense: to cut costs any chance they get. But what about the student workers who relied on notetaking jobs? Whether just for spending change or for their weekly groceries and gas. I understand that higher education is a business and must be profitable, but when will this institution stop making purely economic choices and make a choice that supports their students as well as their academic mission?
For example, because Glean relies on AI, students receiving OOA’s services will lose out on good teaching. A machine cannot pick up on the nuances of an exceptional teacher who interacts with the class, choosing not to sit back and lecture the whole time. Human beings can pick up on those nuances and transfer classroom activities and interactions into beneficial notes that transcend any stale notes a Glean robot could transcribe.
Moreover, when professors knew there was a notetaker in the class, many asked the student notetaker to share the notes with them as well, later publishing them to the class blackboard—making notes accessible for every student. Now, the onus is on the sole student with Glean access to offer up their Gleaned notes for the benefit of the classroom collective—if those notes are even helpful.
Glean does have nifty tools and allows students to flag important material during a lecture, or create a checkbox when the teacher announces an upcoming assignment. However, the reliance on technology instead of one’s peers is daunting. Of course not every notetaker will have submitted the best notes; but with Glean, every student receiving notetaking services gets the same experience. Yes, it’s equal, but when the human aspect—the unique ability humans have to record human interaction—is ripped out of the notetaking process, who suffers? The students who are deserving of OOA’s services suffer.
Junior Delaney Whieldon receives notetaking services and states that she’s been meaning to send an email to OOA voicing her displeasure with the switch. “I hate it. I would rather have a peer notetaker,” she begins.
Whieldon claims that the program does not function well, “When I try to audio transcript it, the lecture doesn’t make sense. When I’m recording on my computer and taking notes too, I can’t hear the lecture, just my keyboard typing.”
She wishes for peer notetakers to be an option again, “A peer notetaker is more helpful. I’ve been lucky, I haven’t had a bad peer notetaker even though I know people who have, but overall, the notetaker was so much better than the AI,” she concludes.
Eliminating notetakers is only the beginning. If the administration isn’t careful, they might one day deem professors to be obsolete—saving themselves the problem of paying a tenure salary, but losing the core principles of a higher education.