NoteAffect
Digital Interactive Learning

The key to making students successful is to improve their learning by increasing their engagement with the teacher and learning materials. As mobile and social media technologies become an integral part of a student’s life, what better way to drive the engagement between students and teachers than with their own digital devices? When Jay Tokosch, Co-Founder and CEO at NoteAffect, founded the company, the aim was to create a platform to enhance and understand classroom engagement. Today, NoteAffect offers rich functionality including live polling, engagement, tracking, analytics, reporting, and more.

NoteAffect’s functionality enables teachers and students via NoteAffect’s platform to engage together through the classroom lecture content, real-time polling, and the ability to ask questions and get answers. “We combine lecture material with students’ notes, answers to questions, and polling results to deliver a dynamic and holistic learning experience for students. This has been very successful in increasing students’ grades. Additionally, teachers and management gain unprecedented insight into classroom engagement and get the ability to identify and improve the performance of at-risk students,” says Tokosch.

NoteAffect is built to leverage teachers’ existing technological knowledge. Teachers start live broadcasting of lectures by the simple click of a button; presentations built in common tools are still used, as they have always been. Students access the lecture either in real time or later through their digital devices (phones, tablets, computers, etc.). Students can, directly on the lecture material, take notes, make annotations, highlight important points, or post questions (and upvote peers’ questions) anonymously to the teacher. Teachers can use the NoteAffect application to answer student questions and keep students engaged and learning. Teachers can also build and embed innovative live polling questions into their presentations, for which students can later view their own answers against the correct answers and continue learning.

The real differentiator for NoteAffect is that everything the students and teacher do is captured, measured, and analyzed. Teachers gain invaluable insights into how students are participating and engaged in the class material. The teachers can also drill down to understand students’ performance at the individual level.

“Our algorithms capture the annotations, notes, highlights, and participation, and relay that information to the teacher to help surface the level of understanding and engagement of each student,” says Tokosch. Moreover, as polling software, lecture capture, and study material storage are all integrated in one application, institutions significantly save on costs.

Our algorithms capture in real time the annotations, notes, highlights, and relay that information to the teacher to assess the understanding and the level of engagement of the students

Accreditation at the institution level is also enhanced by the data NoteAffect captures. Reports based on participation and understanding of material, are easily created to help reduce the administrative burden and expedite the accreditation process.

In an instance, a professor of a renowned school was skeptical about allowing students to utilize digital devices in the classroom-until he experimented with NoteAffect. When he allowed his students to use NoteAffect, he could instantly feel the difference in classroom participation. The students posted questions and answered lecture polling questions consistently. Apart from the increased interactions that resulted in a more engaged learning experience, NoteAffect also delighted the professor and the administration with detailed analysis of the participation and understanding of every student who attended the session.

NoteAffect is developing a feature for students to easily tag and search important notes. With these strategies, the company is redefining the way the academic community leverages interactive digital technologies. Advancing into the future, NoteAffect also aims to expand into the corporate and government arena. The idea is to make meetings more productive by presenting materials in a way that would be easier for the staff to consume. With swift feedbacks which can be securely recorded for self-improvement, employees can perform better with every meeting and drive boardroom productivity.