WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue’s Online Writing Lab, which draws hundreds of millions of visits a year from students writing term papers and job-seekers crafting resumes, will help power writing tools produced by Chegg, in a deal announced Wednesday afternoon by the university and the Santa Clara, California, company.
“We have so many great resources,” said Harry Denny, a Purdue English professor and director of the Purdue Writing Lab. “This is a great way to put those resources to work.”
Chegg is a publicly traded company that, according to a company account, “provides more than 30 million students with AI-driven technology to help with citations, grammar and writing improvements, and accidental plagiarism prevention.”
Through the Chegg site and apps, students can upload documents and get instant feedback on grammar, spelling and more effective ways to get a point across. Denny said the site would draw advice from the Online Writing Lab’s expertise and give students access the lab’s reference guides on research papers, subject-specific writing and general writing.
“The Purdue OWL is recognized globally as the authority on writing instruction,” Nathan Schultz, president of learning services at Chegg, said. “We simply wanted to work with the best writing center possible, and that’s the OWL.”
Denny said this isn’t the first public-private partnership for the Online Writing Lab, which will mark it’s 25th year in 2019. He did not lay out details of the previous partnership.
Denny said the deal with Chegg would be worth “upwards of seven figures” to Purdue. He said Purdue would maintain control of the Online Writing Lab.
The Online Writing Lab is an extension of Purdue’s writing lab, which started 43 years ago in Heavilon Hall.
The Online Writing Lab drew 330 million visits and 515 million page views in the 2017-18 fiscal year, according to Purdue figures.
Denny said the Online Writing Lab’s tip sheets and style guides would remain free at owl.purdue.edu. Those, he said, don’t come with the artificial intelligence features Chegg brings to the materials.
Schultz said Chegg’s advanced writing assistance, which covers grammar and plagiarism checking, is a paid product. The company’s Citation products – which are supported by advertising and used by 30 million student annually – are free to any users, he said. Purdue’s OWL resources will be part of both services, aimed primarily at high school and college students, he said.
“Half the time, we’re dealing with people who have been so beaten down by grammarians and people have really restricted notions of writing that students are afraid to speak, write or do whatever,” Denny said. “So, getting them to a place where they’re comfortable just expressing themselves and organizing their thoughts … then we worry about prose. But students get so upset about putting a comma in the wrong spot or using a preposition incorrectly that they get all kinds of performance anxiety.”
Denny said the deal had been in the works more than a year, before the Online Writing Lab became an unwitting player in a controversy over suspicions that Purdue had banned the word “man” from academic papers.
The story, surfaced in February 2018 by the Campus Reform website and then latched onto by Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” among others. Conservative media outlets spun a decade-old Online Writing Lab guide on how to avoid gender-biased words -- “firefighter” instead of “fireman,” “police officer” instead of “policeman,” “doctor” instead of “woman doctor” – into a full-blown “ban on man.”
(Carlsonfamous dismissed the West Lafayette campus as “an accredited university, apparently,” where it’s easy “to bully the little, rich kids who go to your school” and pay “like $60 grand, or whatever it is, for the fake diploma you get.”)
Purdue eventually dismissed the flap stoked on “Fox and Friends” and assorted talk shows, as teachers came to the Online Writing Lab’s defense on writing rules compiled over the years from various style guides and accepted practices.
Denny said that incident Chegg was aware of that flare-up, though it had no bearing on the deal.
“This partnership is an interesting testament to that long history of 25 years of the power of students, faculty and writing research,” Denny said. “Everything you see on the OWL is culmination of all the work students and faculty, over the years, have put into producing all those resources.”
Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.
