With the runaway growth of of document-sharing site Scribd, a number of competitors are popping up. The most interesting ones are customizing their sites to be useful to communities of people who want to share documents on specific topics.
Docstoc, for example, just launched as a doc sharing site for professionals like lawyers and businesspeople. We’ve recently come across a young startup called TheCollegeFreeway that’s trying to bring easier document-sharing to college classrooms.
When you first go to TheCollegeFreeway, you’ll see a list of the most popular lecture notes, practice tests, problem sets and other docs uploaded from students at Cornell, Santa Clara, Stanford, USC, Princeton or other schools currently listed on the site. Screenshot below.
With the click of a button, you can opt to log in as your Facebook identity and see the list of documents shared by people in your college network. The site uses your Facebook profile information to match you up with notes from others at your school. This lets you avoid creating a user profile and picking out your college.
Instead of going to class and taking notes, just go to TheCollegeFreeway to get them — a way of saving time for Facebook-addicted college students.
The Facebook profile feature is a great example of how Facebook’s user information can be used as a way to more easily access other sites on the web, a concept we’ve been waiting to see applied well. Most Facebook applictions are embedded directly within Facebook, via its developer platform — and they often lack realy utility as most are mindless games.
If you want to upload a document, you can choose to make it private and only share it with designated people on the site. You can also register anonymously if you want to upload the types of documents for classes that might get you in trouble.
When you upload a document, you match your it with the title of the course its related to, the school department and other information, including the ISBN numbers of textbooks used in the course. Matching up textbooks between campuses is a way for students to find relevant notes from peers on other campuses.
Like Scribd and others, TheCollegeFreeway uses Adobe’s Flash Paper to display documents and lets you import from PDF, Word and other standard formats. Screenshot below.
The site is still in an early public beta and is iterating quickly on a somewhat confusing interface. It has already managed to get a couple thousand documents, mostly notes from tech classes at Cornell and USC. There are over one hundred documents for math classes at Cornell, for example.
For those concerned about copyright issues, the site has the usual disclaimers and terms of service here.
Scribd already has a large number of education-related documents on the site, but is not designing features for note-sharing college students like TheCollegeFreeway. On the latter site’s to-do list, for example, is building an application within Facebook that lets people join courses — a good way to funnel those people from Facebook to TheCollegeFreeway.
The company is currently based out of the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, California.
14 Comments
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Aniq Rahman said:
This website is a joke. As a Cornell student, I haven’t found a single document that is useful for my classes yet on it. Someone in the fraternity of one of the guys that start this (SAE) told me that these guys have gotten a $2MM valuation already (via a $200K investment for 10%). Honestly - a ridiculous sum of money for a site far less advanced that Scribd or DocStoc and with 0 design (the icons are from famfamfam and the page itself makes me want to introduce them to a swatch), a horrible domain name, etc.
Overall - there is hardly any motivation for someone to upload their documents (especially since all of the course documents - including old exams - are already on http://blackboard.cornell.edu/ - or sites at respective universities using Blackboard - another Cornell University venture started a decade ago). I don’t see many students using this and definitely do not see professors using this - and the copyright disclaimer is laughable as well…
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Allan Amitray said:
On the other hand, I’m also a student at Cornell and I’ve found plenty of relevant documents, regardless if someone from a fraternity started the site.
Additionally, knowing that my last year’s Econ review guide is being viewed by over 100 students is more than enough reason to continue uploading throughout my stay here; I would rather see my work be used by others instead of being dragged into the recycling bin.
All in all, its a great idea and its already doing wonders for students who have access to relevant documents. It may lock horns with teachers or find troubles when looking for uploaders, but I look forward to the site expanding; because there will be a lot more happy students than just the founders of TCF.
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James Ioannidis said:
Aniq, I’m a member of the team at TheCollegeFreeway.com. I’m sorry you haven’t been able to find useful content on our site, but I’m glad to hear others like Allan have.
The site launched only two months ago, so perhaps more relevant documents will be available in the future. In the meantime, why not help out your colleagues by uploading? With the runaway growth of sites like Wikipedia, it seems that philanthropy and online image are more than enough motivation for user contribution, but keep an eye peeled for future incentives!
Also, I’m not sure what you mean by a site “far less advanced than Scribd or DocStoc.” If you have any specific suggestions we’re definitely interested, just shoot an email to james@thecollegefreeway.com
Lastly I’d like to point out that “all of the course documents” are not available on Blackboard. Blackboard sites are typically only available for the current semester. Our service is fundamentally different than Blackboard’s, allowing students to contribute documents and allowing those documents to be retrieved across schools and semesters.
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TCF? said:
Hmm Allan Amitay? Isnt he a brother in the SAE fraternity which started the college freeway?
well… thats just deceiving
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Cornell student '09 said:
I heard that during SAE’s pledging they forced the pledges to upload documents onto the college freeway?
i thought the incentive of spreading knowledge was supposed to be enough :-(
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Greg Ziemak said:
if you dont like the site dont use it. get a life.
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Ian postman said:
Yo I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I love the college free way. I am gay, but the college freeway is no where near as gay as I am. And I would know because I got a reacharound from my finance professor.
Toodles!!
Postman -
Online College Math Course said:
Where was this blog a year ago? Great article (the free way to share class notes, using Facebook)! Can you believe I was searching for Online College Math Course when I fond this post Thursday.
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TheCollegeFreeway, Inc. said:
Check out http://www.CourseHero.com for tons of added content!
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jey2283 said:
ShareNotes.com (http://www.ShareNotes.com) is a unique online lecture note sharing service. We’ve created a collaborative environment that allows college students who share classes to also share their lecture notes, exams information, written reports, study guides and more.
ShareNotes.com is 100% free to use, simply create a log in and start sharing / downloading lecture notes. Additionally, ShareNotes.com does not take any part of the your commissions, Share your notes without sharing the profits.
Ipod Touch Giveaway
iPod Touches will be given away as follows:
250th Registered Member With Uploaded Notes
500th Registered Member With Uploaded Notes
1000th Registered Member With Uploaded Notes
1500th Registered Member With Uploaded Notes
2500th Registered Member With Uploaded NotesMember Who Uploads the 500th Note
Member Who Uploads the 1000th Note
Member Who Uploads the 1500th Note
Member Who Uploads the 2000th Note
Member Who Uploads the 2500th NoteFYI: thecollegefreeway.com became coursehero.com and is now a paid subscription service :(.
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Wikipedia Brown said:
Oh hai. I can has startup?
What an awful execution of a ‘good’ concept. Too bad all us Ivy league kids are too cutthroat to put anything legit up on there…
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Andres said:
Aniq go fuck yourself
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Sean Conway said:
I guess you guys havent seen the new kids on the block. Quality documents that are actually relevant to your course
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Sean Conway said:
Notehall.com I should add haha
One Trackback
12:47 pm
Online homework helper Cramster gets $3 million » VentureBeat said:
[...] While Cramster has already experienced growth during this past school year and has good standing with its Courses 2.0 Facebook application, Cramster’s initial round of funding will go towards new subject areas beyond math and science, as well as marketing towards college and high school markets. There are a number of education-related networks that provide online resources and/or leverage Facebook for homework assistance, such as TheCollegeFreeway. [...]