Startup Idea: Collaborative Online Note-taking and Engagement Measurement Software for Education

Startup idea to develop a collaborative note-taking software which could also measure student engagement during lectures. The software would monitor student activities and prompt them to confirm engagement at regular intervals, providing aggregated, anonymous data to assist professors in improving instruction efficacy. Added features could potentially include comparing and analyzing different students' notes and responses to measure instructional effectiveness.

I work in higher education in a law school. There is increasing demand for us to measure student outcomes and learning in a field where most instruction is delivered via lecture format to students sitting with their laptops and taking notes, and engaging in discussion It is difficult to know how many students are actually listening and attentive at any given point in a lecture, or whether they are doing other things and are checked out. We do not have a way of monitoring their engagement with the subject, except for cumbersome online quizzes or other activities that can be done only by asking them to log in to a platform and do something. It would be very useful for some type of collaborative online note taking program that could not only help students take notes, but could also measure how much a student was actually tuned in and engaged, or was doing something else. This type of software could monitor what a student typically does and detect anomalous behavior. To protect a student's privacy, professors or instructors could receive aggregate data without knowing which students were tuned in at any point. This software could have built in timers, etc. that would ask students to click if they were still working/listening, etc. There might even be as way for the software to analyze how similar or different each students notes or reactions were in terms of how effective a professor was in getting his or her message across.

I would pay for such software and work to have my faculty adopt such software for instructional use.