These guidelines will help to ensure that the quality of the materials on Community stays high, and that the work on Community can be trusted. By trying to follow these guidelines, you can ensure that your notes are enjoyed by many other members, and you can trust in the fact that the materials you upload will help others to learn and grow as students.
GoodNotes Community is all about sharing useful, informative, and inspiring, high-quality study materials to help each other get unstuck. As such, we have prepared these guidelines to help you understand the do’s and don’ts of uploading material to the platform.
✅ What types of materials can you upload?
Anything that could be useful or inspiring for others. For example:
- Revised and annotated lecture notes
- Study guides
- Practice problem sets
- Past exams
- Step by step solutions to practice problems and past exams
- Flashcard decks
- Topic summaries & infographics
- Breakdowns of complex problems and example questions
- Things like hex-code guides, paper templates, or planners (as long as they were made by you) - anything that can help someone else improve their studying!
You can upload documents directly from your GoodNotes library or from the Files app on your device. You can also upload documents that you didn’t create in GoodNotes.
Below are a few examples on some great materials we currently have on Community:
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❌ What materials shouldn’t you upload?
A) Material that is infringing copyrights: When sharing materials in the GoodNotes Community, please respect academic integrity as well as copyrights. Examples of content you shouldn’t upload are: Other people’s materials, entire textbooks, lecture slides that are not publicly available.
You’re free to include screenshots or images that you found online (e.g. Google image search) in your material. If you’re using screenshots from textbooks or lecture slides, please make sure you’re only using them to support the rest of the content. They shouldn’t make up the majority of your material.
If you find that that anything infringes your or another person’s copyright (or is in any way inappropriate), please report the inappropriate content to us either through Community directly (by opening the material and pressing More (...) > Report), or through this link. For more information on this, see our help article: "I noticed some content that I believe should not be on the platform. What should I do?"
B) Materials that lack context: Some notes might be very useful for yourself but others would have a hard time making sense out of them. For example: Quick scribbles from a lecture or a study group with relevant keywords or bullet points can help you to recall what has been said. Others that didn’t attend can’t really use this information without having the context.
💡 Tips for Creating Great Content
Alongside these rules on what content is or isn't allowed on Community, we have also pulled together some tips on what you can do to ensure that others can find your material easier.
- Choose a Representative Thumbnail: When you upload a document to the Community, the first page will be the document thumbnail and will be what other people see first. We recommend choosing a page as the first page that represents the content of the rest of the document well. For example: Consider removing the notebook cover of a document before you upload it to the community and replace it with a page that gives others a better preview of the content.
- Choose a Specific Subject: Before publishing your materials, you will need to select a subject that fits the document best. This helps others to find materials per subject. Understanding the subject you plan to upload for before you post can allow you to focus your notes, and in turn improve them for others.
- Make use of the Title and Description: A lot of students are directly searching for materials. That means that the document title and description are very important fields - as our search function will use these to suggest content. Apart from telling others what to expect, consider using the following information (in the description) to help others understand if the material is relevant:
- University name
- Course/Class title and year
- Professor's name who taught the class
- Other subjects that the material might be useful for if the topic is applicable to multiple areas
- Make use of Tags: In a similar way to how the title and description play a part in the search bar's recommendations, the tags you use on your study materials also help with sharing your content. Some users searching for more general notes will benefit from you tagging your materials with relevant tags.