Making learning fun, easy and social – Noted

By Hetu Nandu on February 9, 2016 5 Comments / 2740 views

We have all done this. Google a doubt or copy paste Wikipedia in our projects and reports. But did you ever stop and think that will this ever help me in life?

If you have ever tried studying something online, you will know how tough it is. Yes there is a plethora of information and a lot of it is free for use too but you know you can’t trust most of it. I mean “never believe everything you read on the Internet” right? But say you do find a few trustful websites; but where do you start from? How complete is the source material? How updated is the content? For college students a general question is: Is this even in my syllabus?

We at Noted are trying to solve these and many more problems related to online education and learning in general.

Noted is a Social Learning platform.

What does that mean?

Think of it as Facebook meets your textbook. But unlike a traditional textbook, content is properly divided into many small and searchable ‘concepts’ and create unlimited private ‘notes’ of those concepts. It is not an endless saga of boring text but has videos and photos to keep it more interesting. There are multiple explanations to a concept so you can read your teacher’s explanation but also that of a classmates’ and decide which one you like the best. It is social, so you can follow teachers, class scholars and subject domain experts or if you are a lone ranger, subscribe to subjects of your liking and get updates for them.

What makes Noted different?

Content is crowd-sourced and free for all. You can learn and teach for free.
It is social. So you can follow the class scholar and get all their notes.
It has multiple explanations in text, video, image and soon audio too.
You can create unlimited notes (private or public)
A platform for learning: When you are bored, instead of going to the garbage online, you can learn something new.

Check out our How it works video:

Comments

Hetu Nandu

5 Comments

asha chaudhry February 10, 2016, 5:29 am

hi hetu,

i think you’re in an interesting space trying to solve a genuine problem students face. and in this digital/social age – where we share everything under the sky, why not share one’s study notes?! 🙂

i think it’s an intelligent way to encourage students to learn. i went to your site and loved the fact that all of you are students?! way to go!

one thing i wanted to ask – so while the resources are crowdsourced – do you curate the lists? that would help i reckon…

ps: do add your twitter handles at the end of the post – helps me promote!

all the best!
Hetu Nandu February 10, 2016, 7:27 am

Hi Asha,

Thank you so much for the positive review 🙂

Regarding curation, we check through every explanation uploaded on Noted to avoid spam.

We are also soon rolling out a feature that will give you daily snapshot of t major learning from current happenings in the world. So if RBI tomorrow would increase the CRR by 2 Points, we will send out couple of explanations about what CRR is, its implications, etc.

Our goal is to stop making students think that if they are in engineering, they don’t need to know about Finance. Things like these affects us all and should be understood by us.
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal February 14, 2016, 3:10 pm
Honestly, Its very confusing and I think factually misleading.

There is no WHY to the question or answer?

Consider – https://noted.study/concepts/19

Swati Hegde
Student at ASMSOC – NMIMS
A shift in the supply curve may occur due to any of the following determinants:

Input Prices: If the price of milk increases, Kwality Walls will have to raise the price of their ice cream in order to maintain their profit margins, or cut down on the production of ice cream. Supply of a good is negatively related to the price of its inputs.

Technology: Improvements in technology reduce the time and costs incurred during production, which in turn shifts the supply curve to the right leading to an increase in supply.

Expectations: If monsoons are approaching, umbrella manufacturers would rather increase their production then than now, and may even cut down on production or store some stock for the future.

Number of Sellers: The chocolate industry is booming because of the number of sellers in the market. If Cadbury or Nestle pulled out, the supply of chocolate would fall dramatically.
MY POINTS:

I cant understand the point you are making?

What happens when there is a strike in a factory?
A natural calamity? (Coffee last year)
A government ban on sales (Maggi)

I could cite 1000 such reasons! So what’s the point?

***

Ps – KILL the registration – You site will go nowhere if you insist on registrations!
Hetu Nandu February 15, 2016, 4:48 pm
Hey Alok,

I did not really get your doubt, so I will try to explain what I could get. Incase that still does not answer your doubt, do tell me.

For the explanation quoted ( https://noted.study/concepts/19 ) :

You are correct that there might be a lot of reasons why a supply of an item may be affected, but over here we are mainly talking about how the supply of a whole industry is affected. When Maggi was banned, other noodle brands could still supply the goods. The shift in demand curve is another concept that can be found here (point 3 to be precise). But you are correct, a natural calamity can affect a whole industry goods supply if it is a specialty good like coffee. I will add that point to the explanation.

For the content in general:

We have been tackling with the problem of content completeness and correctness since the start. The thing is that you can never know when these two factors are always true, and to which degree is it acceptable. But we have implemented a few things like
- Content approval – Someone from our team has to approve content before which it is live but flagged as not approved
- Get experts involved – Each day we are getting more teachers and alumni onboard who add and approve content
- A credibility score for each explanation based on user feedback.
- A system in which anyone can complete an alleged incomplete explanation. The new ‘complete explanation’ is independent of the original one but credit for the same is given to the original creator and the person(s) who contributed on that explanation.
Crowdsourcing is the cause of this problem but it is the path we have chosen to ensure that the content on Noted is always free. We are constantly ideating on new ways to ensure content credibility and completeness.

Regarding registrations, the library is free of cost and anyone can visit it without any registrations. The way the landing page has been set up, one might be confused about this fact, I will change that immediately. Registrations are only required if you are adding content and for the social part of noted which cannot work without user accounts.

Also, thanks for the honest feedback 🙂 much appreciated.
Sridhar Rajendran February 19, 2016, 5:16 am
Hi Hetu,

I checked out your website and here is my feedback:
- The UI is clean and easy to navigate
- Like the cue card sort of nature to each topic. Will be useful for students who want to just brush up topics.
- The explainer video needs serious rework.
- Like Alok mentioned, the homepage redirects to a login page and there is no direct link to access the Library. Users might want to get a taste of things before they sign up. So a redesign to display Library would be nice.