By Nir Ziv

Covid-19 most likely will be remembered as the 21st century’s version of the 1917 flu pandemic and industries certainly have changed forever because it. Food (restaurants, groceries, concert halls, etc.), travel (hotels, BNBs, airlines, cruises, tourist attractions), social (meetings, weddings, birthdays, funerals), shopping (brick and mortar and malls — which were already suffering even before Covid-19) all these will never be the same.

For example, lets face it, masks are no longer just something you see on the news in East Asia during yellow dust season. It is here in the western, eastern and middle eastern world and it is here to stay. We may not always wear them as conservatively, but it will likely never again appear odd to be wearing one in public no matter where you are in the world. It is the world’s new norm.

One industry that has rapidly been affected by Covid is education, and this includes all level of education from the lower to higher institutions. Schools like Harvard and Yale have already announced that in the following year they will encourage and even push students that don’t need to be on campus to stay home and just have classes online. This means that students are coming back home and learning from home, but still paying top dollars to “go” and get an education….online.

Don’t get me wrong, education is important; as someone who proudly holds multiple degrees I’m all about higher education. Yet what I wonder and worry is how the students will be able to afford the tuition without on campus and local jobs and internships. Over the books of history we see similar times of crisis what we learn is that from hardships come innovation. From these limitations comes the creative mind to overcome the constraints.

So, when it comes to higher education I question: what is the common thing among students, which all are looking for and many posses? NOTES. And every student actively seeks notes from past lectures or from acquaintances in current classes. It helps us better understand the subject and it helps us review the coming material in advance. We are always looking for the students that took good notes and are willing to share.

Now imagine you are one of these note takes. A medical student who has amazing notes about the heart and brain. Law students that were able to summarize law cases in such a way that even someone new to the subject will understand. Or an engineer that could put into a few pages something that took a lecture hours to explain.

Naturally you will not want to give your hard labor, your creative thinking, for free. I know I wouldn’t. So why not sell them? Why not put your hard labor to work for you and give yourself passive income. Income that can help with tuition. Income that will remove the burden from yourself as well as your family. It is already anyway now collecting dust in folders or hard drives, so why not put it in a place where it can earn you dollars.

Gaining access to notes would be an innovative solution that could ease the constrains of online learning. Smartnotes.ai; a marketplace that cuts the path between the people that are looking for the notes and the people that are willing to sell their notes. Notes by students and for students all in one place.

So why Smartnotes? Honestly, with ease to upload, powered by search engine and universally able to download to any device, the real question is, Why Not?