We're always striving to provide solutions that truly make a difference to students and the institutions that support them. As such, we're so excited to have our latest product out in the open: The Confident Notetaker's Masterclass.
This is Genio’s first online course, designed to develop note taking skills, boost confidence, and encourage proactive learning, all while easing the burden on university admins. With 84% of students in pre-launch testing discovering new note taking confidence from our course, we’re excited to make this resource available to all Genio Notes users!
This isn't just another churned-out resource; our new product has been carefully crafted over the past year. In this post, we'll take you behind the scenes and share the process from identifying a need for it, to developing, testing, and launching it.
What was the challenge?
Recent conversations with universities and colleges consistently mentioned a key issue: the growing need for academic support among students, alongside a reduction of resources and infrastructure within institutions. Budget cuts, staff shortages, and increased caseloads mean that while the need for support may be urgent, the department’s capacity is often strained and nearing maximum capacity.
All of this creates a direct impact on students. There is a significant number of students who, through no fault of their own, are poorly equipped for higher education. As a result, many of these students suffer from excessive stress, low self-confidence and poor academic performance, which can all result in low motivation, or even dropout.
Our approach
We had a clear goal in mind for combating these challenges: to develop a solution that empowers students with effective note taking skills, without creating additional strain within already stretched university resources. Both of these felt like non-negotiables, but in our research, we discovered that these goals were mutually exclusive in many existing solutions.
For learners, we aimed to design a solution with interesting, interactive elements to encourage more engagement than static documents. These documents often involve paragraph upon paragraph of text and information, leading to passive skim reading. Instead, we decided to introduce dynamic and interactive components, including:
- Rich audio and video content
- Quizzes
- Thoughtful free text self-reflection.
- Gamification: Badges and certificates to celebrate progress
Then we considered the needs of admins, who often deliver skills workshops to help with note taking and other study skills. Although these workshops are fantastic and engaging for learners, we also know from working with many institutions that they can be difficult to organise and maintain with stretched resources. Perhaps most importantly, we realised we needed a scalable solution that required no hands-on management from university admins, to free up their valuable time.
The team behind the masterclass
To manage this project, a dedicated team from Genio collaborated with two external experts - a learning design expert, and a consultant. Joanne, our consultant was tasked with providing evidence of the challenge by talking to admins and students.
Then Vikki, our learning designer, was brought on board to design and deliver an effective and engaging online course based on our findings. At the centre of this project was Sammy, our Learning Lead, with crucial support from Ashley in our Product Marketing team to build the course content. Fun fact: you’ll hear Ashley speaking in several of the modules!
With over three decades of invaluable teaching experience, Sammy, Joanne and Vikki worked together to ensure that the course content was not only accurate, but practical, interactive and impactful for learners. Having both internal and external input was vital to the success of this project, bringing together in-depth knowledge of Genio users and their needs, and wider industry-level design trends and knowledge.
Rigorous testing and remarkable outcomes
Before making The Confident Notetaker's Masterclass available to all Genio Notes users, we conducted pre-launch testing to measure its effectiveness and refine the learning experience. Our testing methodology included two self-reflection modules, strategically placed before and after the course.
These modules asked almost identical questions, allowing us to gauge the course's direct impact on key areas such as student confidence and knowledge. We even discovered that these modules are great for students to measure improvements themselves, so we’ve decided to keep them in!
The insights gained from this testing phase were invaluable, giving us confidence in the solution. Three key statistics particularly stood out to demonstrate a positive impact:
- 84% said that the course helped them build confidence in their note taking ability.
- 94% agreed that the course taught them something new.
- 51% more students reported clearer note taking strategies after completing the course.
These results validated our approach and confirmed to us that The Confident Notetaker's Masterclass will be a powerful tool to empower learners with effective note taking skills. As well as statistics, we received several pieces of positive feedback (and even a blog post!) from testers, all of which are current Genio Notes users. Here are a couple of our favourites:
‘I liked that it was pretty quick and took you from pre-lecture prep to post-lecture/pre-exam review. It went over how to prepare for notes, actually taking notes, and how to effectively use them.’ - Maria
‘[I learned that] good notetaking is not about just writing things down. It is a mix of many different strategies that when put in place together, can help you take better notes in each of your classes.’ - Kaya
‘My key takeaways were to be more intentional with my notes - to go in with a plan, and make sure I can revise to make sure my notes are actually useful to me.’ - Amirtha
‘[It] did a great job of differentiating a few of the main notetaking strategies and identifying which information or course content would be most appropriate for each style. I don't know if I've ever seen notetaking presented in this way before and it gave me a better understanding of certain approaches that I previously didn't understand the purpose of!’ - Rosie
What's next?
We are incredibly excited to announce that The Confident Notetaker's Masterclass is now available to all Genio Notes users! Learners can find the link to the course in the Genio Notes app, and simply need to log in with their existing account details.
We are already looking to expand our course offering to include a wider range of topics. Next up, we want to show learners how to unlock their full potential using Genio Notes.
Stay tuned to find out more!
