The company StudyMode has created a shareable portal where students can upload and access class notes from various courses. The system is in its early stages of deployment at San Diego State.

All students must contribute study notes in order to join the StudyMode shared drive. To access the drive, students input their email address and then upload notes to gain access to the site. Once students have shared files, they can access more than 1,330 documents in different subject areas.

“The ultimate vision is to build the world’s largest community for students who want to share and obtain knowledge,” StudyMode President Thomas Swalla said. “That’s the ultimate goal. How do we share products that help and bring students together to share and collaborate?”

The notes are categorized by class subject.

Students can upload notes from various accounts, such as Evernote, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, Facebook and Box.

StudyMode runs on a software-based cloud system similar to Google Drive, except it caters to college students accessing notes from their peers.

Swalla said StudyMode is a quicker, easier and better way for students to access notes.

Some SDSU students have already tried out the shared-drive system.

“It’s good for students to share notes to get different ideas from other people,” biochemistry senior Susan Bayooz said.

Bayooz said she usually gets notes from her friends and peers, but having access to more notes online is convenient.

“I am still playing around with the site, but for my major there aren’t too many notes,” Bayooz said. “Maybe they should address that.”

StudyMode chose SDSU as one of nine universities to test its product in part due to the school’s diverse student population.

The universities currently using services provided by StudyMode include Arizona State, UC Santa Barbara, Cal Poly Pomona, Towson University,  Penn State and UC Irvine.

The company is independent from the university and will not be integrated in as an educational program, like Connect and Blackboard.