When Goodnotes—the developer behind the handwritten notetaking app of the identical time—realized that thousands and thousands of academics had been utilizing their product within the classroom, it sensed a chance.
“We realized they had been hacking our note-taking app for instructing,” 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’ consumer base, which totals 24 million month-to-month customers worldwide.
Goodnotes Classroom, delicate launched in August, assists the trainer in all levels of a lesson: preparation, supply, and evaluation. A trainer can use Goodnotes to design a lesson plan, ship the assignments to his or her college students, after which grade work virtually immediately by a brand new AI device. Academics can even disseminate one pupil’s work to a complete classroom—all on the Goodnotes platform—to help with studying.
Tran says Goodnotes wished to discover how you can make the product “so easy and so intuitive for the trainer to make use of, in order that their onboarding is as fast as potential and as painless as potential.” However a part of the issue was that early adopters—those doing the “hacking”—had been already specialists. “We needed to exit of our approach to discover much less technically inclined academics and speak 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 would possibly use the app in follow. “Observing customers in motion is much extra highly effective than simply an interview,” Rowena Chung, the group lead on Classroom, says. “It gave us plenty of insights on the place to focus and enhance.”
Goodnotes examined Classroom with 16 faculties 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.Ok. are actually utilizing the product.
What’s Goodnotes?
Steven Chan based Goodnotes in 2011, one yr after the discharge of Apple’s iPad. Chan, a arithmetic pupil based mostly in Australia on the time, mentioned he was annoyed by the shortage of a great handwriting app on the pill. The startup acquired $6 million in seed funding from Race Capital in 2020; two years later, its notetaking app received Apple’s “iPad App of the Yr” award.
Goodnotes is now investing additional into AI, buying dropthebit, a South Korean startup that makes use of AI to assist arrange assembly and video content material into summarized notes.
Final month, Goodnotes launched a sequence of recent AI-enabled companies, together with an AI assistant that would reply prompts utilizing a consumer’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 substitute. “No trainer would need to quit the grading course of to an AI, proper?”
He warns designers to not get centered on “AI for AI’s sake.”
“On the finish of the day, AI has to allow your consumer, empower your customers, to do one thing that they need 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 Expertise,” designs that blur the road between the bodily and digital worlds to captivate customers and foster lasting connections. Register right here!
