“Dr. George and I started thinking, what can we do to get our hands around this issue,” said Dixon, an assistant professor of humanities and communication. “If there are 100,000 documents matching our university’s content, that’s too much for any one thing. It became clear that we had to find a new way to kind of automate the process, game it, if you will, and that set us off on the journey.”
Dixon and George have worked with computer science students to develop a tool they call CourseVillain, a customized search engine that searches Course Hero for documents related to Embry-Riddle courses and partially autopopulates copyright takedown requests. As of late last week, the search engine had turned up 237,293 artifacts traceable to Embry-Riddle, according to George.