What: OneClass is one of several sites that will let you earn money for sharing your class notes in college, but most others pay more
Expected pay: nominal
Husl $core: $
Where: Colleges and universities nationwide
Requirements: Take detailed class notes; have the ability to upload them to OneClass; follow the OneClass program guidelines
Review:
There are several companies that pay you to share your college class notes with fellow students, including One Class, Nexus Notes and Study Soup. Of the three, Study Soup and Nexus Notes provide VASTLY better deals for note-takers.
Here’s why: Study Soup pays cash for notes via stated contractual formula that essentially provides $25 per upload. One Class gives you “credits” for essentially the same activity. What are those credits worth? About 20 cents per upload, according to Kevin Wu, the company’s Chief Operating Officer.
The site will pay more if you are invited to upload your notes, or if you become one of their “official notetakers” — the “highest category” of notetakers on One Class. Still, the pay pales in comparison to the competion, providing between $10 for 16 uploads for regular notetakers and $20 per upload for “official” notetakers. In both cases, the pay is considerably less than what you could earn with Study Soup.
Nexus Notes, meanwhile, pays roughly $17.50 each time a student buys your notes, which could lead to being paid multiple times for the same notes. So…do you want to earn 20 cents for your notes or $25? You’re in college. I’ll let you figure out why SideHusl gives OneClass our lowest rating.
By the way, if StudySoup or Nexus Notes aren’t available at your school, talk to the Disability Services department. It’s possible that you could sell class notes yourself like this blogger did. Generally, the Disability Services department will pay a set fee per class, not per upload. However, those fees are sometimes competitive with the better online platforms. And they are almost certain to pay better than OneClass.
What their note-takers say:
“They increased the points needed to cash out. Before you needed 800 points to get $10 gift card. Now you need 1200 point to get $10. Why are my notes worth less now? To cash out I need to upload 16 notes to get $10 when before you needed almost 10 notes. 16 notes are basically all the notes from one class. Talk about a rip-off.
“When I first started on OneClass, you could redeem $10 dollars at a time for Amazon or Paypal. With the old version, I had made 40 dollars in the span of about two weeks from uploading notes. Not a lot in terms of how long it took me to perfect my notes, but considering that no one else pays for them, it was worth it. Before I finished my semester, I had collected enough credits to redeem another 20 dollars. I decided to leave them there so I could save up, and redeem them when I got enough for a 100 dollar redemption. It was a way of avoiding pointless spending. Joke’s on me though, because now the instant redemption of 10 dollars has been removed.
If I could give a zero star rating to OneClass, I would. For starters, I graduated from a large university (you would think there would be plenty of notes available), and any documents that related to courses I took were outdated and basically useless. I wanted to use them as an alternative to my own notes.. yet it took more time to even distinguish what was useable than to actually study.
Now, on to the customer service. I received a single OneClass email when I purchased a years subscription (mind you, in no regard is it cheap – it cost me 119 dollars Canadian).. until a year later, when I was charged it again and notified of the charge. No warning, no spam email, nothing. Of course I forgot about it, I barely even looked at it when I first got it, and then hadn’t in probably 10 months.
I attempted to call.. well, they don’t have a phone number. I sent an email about this, asking of the charge (and a refund) and received one back 2-3 days later stating they cancelled my subscription and all was well. But did I get a refund? It seemed so..? I mean, what kind of company would do that, but I figured I’d ask anyways since the email was far from clear. As you can likely see with my frustration, I did not receive a refund, only a rude email in return. So here I am, warning you to stay away from this trash company. Spend a few extra hours looking at your own notes, this is a waste of time and money.