Like most people who create something new, Keerth Raveendra (BSc’20) began with a nagging problem to solve.
He enjoyed learning about Anatomy and Cell Biology at the McGill Faculty of Science, but he struggled to find value in many of his lectures. “I attended every class, but I didn’t get what I wanted out of the experience,” he remembered. “You would have hundreds of students writing down the same thing for an hour instead of coming prepared to discuss and go deeper. Personally, it was easy for me to get wrapped up in the details as I took notes, losing sight of the bigger picture the professors were trying to convey.”
Looking around, Raveendra realized he wasn’t alone in his frustration. “Lectures were optimized for the majority of students, so those who learned at a different speed were more likely to fall through the cracks,” he pointed out. On the other hand, he also noticed that in every class of 200 to 300 students, somewhere between 10 to 20 percent of students had discovered a lifeline: the Note-Taking Club, a group of students hired by Student Council to create comprehensive, high-quality lecture notes that capture the course’s content.
For a fee of $40, students can buy lecture note packages, called NTCs, for each course and access them using a paper membership card. The week after each class, members receive a printed copy of the notes to summarize what they had heard in the lecture. “For me and many of my peers, NTCs were an absolute game changer,” said Raveendra. “Essentially, they helped us learn how to learn more effectively.”
As part of his leadership role in the Science Undergraduate Society (SUS), Raveendra developed an ambitious plan to modernize the NTC system and digitize the membership card. He and his classmate in the Faculty of Science, Maxime Lapointe-Gagner, worked to recruit three volunteer programmers from McGill’s Computer Task Force to build a unique NTC app. The product they envisioned would digitize the NTC experience so that students could access their notes electronically. Ultimately, the duo hoped to facilitate the distribution of NTCs and make them available to every student free of charge.
All Raveendra and his team needed to complete the first phase of the project was a $300 tablet, but the funding they expected to receive fell through at the last minute. “Bruce has always been incredibly supportive, so we asked him to help us bring our vision to fruition,” remembered Raveendra. “Fortunately, he stepped in to help immediately. His support was the sparkplug for our efforts, the piece that made everything else possible.”
Through funding from the Science Opportunities Fund, Raveendra and his team purchased the tablet and launched the new NTC app. Their successful pilot in two classes provided the justification for the McGill Biology Student Union to offer free NTCs to students taking BIOL 200, McGill’s largest life science course. Raveendra graduated in early 2020, but he remains in close contact with Lapointe-Gagner, who continues to lead the initiative to extend the free-and-digitized NTC model to all of McGill’s courses. “Thanks to support from the Science Opportunities Fund, we were able to take an important step in creating a better learning environment for everyone,” affirmed Raveendra.