When Goodnotes—the developer behind the handwritten notetaking app of the identical time—discovered that tens of millions of academics have been utilizing their product within the classroom, it sensed a chance.
“We realized they were hacking our note-taking app for teaching,” Minh Tran, chief working officer at Goodnotes says, by utilizing the app’s “presenter mode” as a de facto digital whiteboard.
Educators make up a large a part of Goodnotes’ person base, which totals 24 million month-to-month customers worldwide.
Goodnotes Classroom, smooth launched in August, assists the instructor in all phases of a lesson: preparation, supply, and evaluation. A instructor can use Goodnotes to design a lesson plan, ship the assignments to his or her college students, after which grade work nearly immediately by way of a brand new AI device. Lecturers can even disseminate one pupil’s work to a complete classroom—all on the Goodnotes platform—to help with studying.
Tran says Goodnotes needed to discover find out how to make the product “so simple and so intuitive for the teacher to use, so that their onboarding is as quick as possible and as painless as possible.” However a part of the issue was that early adopters—those doing the “hacking”—have been already specialists. “We had to go out of our way to find less technically inclined teachers and talk to them,” he says.
The startup even turned one in all their assembly rooms right into a mock classroom so builders might observe how academics may use the app in observe. “Observing users in action is far more powerful than just an interview,” Rowena Chung, the staff lead on Classroom, says. “It gave us a lot of insights on where to focus and improve.”
Goodnotes examined Classroom with 16 colleges in Hong Kong, all of which bought the software program upon its launch, Chung notes. Faculties in markets like Singapore, Taiwan, Germany and the U.Okay. at the moment are utilizing the product.
What’s Goodnotes?
Steven Chan based Goodnotes in 2011, one 12 months after the discharge of Apple’s iPad. Chan, a arithmetic pupil based mostly in Australia on the time, stated he was annoyed by the shortage of an excellent handwriting app on the pill. The startup acquired $6 million in seed funding from Race Capital in 2020; two years later, its notetaking app gained Apple’s “iPad App of the Year” award.
Goodnotes is now investing additional into AI, buying dropthebit, a South Korean startup that makes use of AI to assist manage assembly and video content material into summarized notes.
Final month, Goodnotes launched a collection of recent AI-enabled providers, together with an AI assistant that might reply prompts utilizing a person’s handwritten notes as a dataset. The app lets customers simply modify, align, and reflow their handwritten textual content: Consider it like resizing a textual content field, solely with handwriting as a substitute of a pc font.
Tran stresses that Goodnotes Classroom’s AI options are solely meant to be a “copilot” for academics, not a alternative. “No teacher would want to give up the grading process to an AI, right?”
He warns designers to not get centered on “AI for AI’s sake.”
“At the end of the day, AI has to enable your user, empower your users, to do something that they want to do in your app,” he explains.
Fortune’s Brainstorm Design convention is returning on Dec. 5 on the MGM Cotai in Macau, China. Panelists and attendees will debate and talk about “Experiments in Experience,” designs that blur the road between the bodily and digital worlds to captivate customers and foster lasting connections. Register right here!
