It's not just about building a great tool, but also about learning how to use it effectively.
Hi there, I’m Chen Li and I’m the creator of ClipNotes.
My mission at ClipNotes is to unlock the learning potential of video.
Before talking about how to learn with ClipNotes, it’s important to understand a little bit more about me.
I’m an extremely curious person who loves learning. In high school, I took all the Advanced Placement courses available until the school ran out of them. When I was in college, I took full advantage of a liberal arts education and graduated with a double major and a minor. In my professional career, I’ve worked in multiple positions in many industries, ranging from delivering food to building video games, and now, building ClipNotes.
I’ve learned a lot of things, some in more traditional teacher-student environments, and the rest through experience and self-teaching.
I am a big believer of continual education and learning, and ClipNotes is a manifestation of that desire.
Now you know why I'm here, let's get to the topic at hand.
The short answer - Anything you want to learn is already online, and ClipNotes helps you learn by giving you the tools to transition from watching to learning.
Now, for the long answer, which has three parts.
The internet is a wonderful place, and there’s educational content everywhere you look.
Udemy, a leading online education platform, has over 183,000 courses on a wide variety of topics. Coursera, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) company, has over 3000+ courses on a wide variety of topics as well. Those aren’t the only two of course - There’s Skillshare, Monthly, Masterclass, EdX, and so many other flavors of online classes that it is difficult to list them all.
Furthermore, this list is primarily about places offering online courses, but this doesn’t include the vast amount of resources available in text form. People have been learning and will still be learning from books for the foreseeable future. The local library has more knowledge than any one person will ever remember, and the largest libraries in the world have over 150 million volumes in their collection.
If you think that’s big, then let’s not forget about the biggest collection in the world when it comes to video - Youtube. You can find some insane statistics about Youtube. Here’s a quote directly from their blog in 2017 when they hit 1,000,000,000 hours of content on Youtube - “If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years.” In 2021, that number has only grown and will keep growing.
The best part of Youtube is that there is a video for almost anything you want.
Educational content is everywhere, so it’s not a lack of content that makes learning a challenge.
Let me go back a moment to my example about libraries.
Can you imagine a world in which there are books, but no notebooks and no pencils for you to take notes? Imagine that you had to read a book front to back and then simply remember all of the information. If you wanted to recall information, you’d need to go back to the book and then find the exact page.
This is our world when it comes to video!
There’s billions upon billions of hours of video footage on the internet, and there was no way to take notes on it - until ClipNotes.
ClipNotes is exactly what the name says - Clips and Notes. It’s a new twist on a phenomenon that has already manifested itself in a variety of ways.
Let me give you a few examples of what I mean.
All of these formats utilize the power of video footage to communicate what words alone cannot.
ClipNotes combines the power of video and the versatility of text, and makes it easy and accessible for anyone to create their own. Simply add a video, create the clip, and add notes.
The final piece of the equation to learning anything from ClipNotes is how it’s used.
Let’s go back to traditional books and other texts. In school, I was told to take notes on whatever I was learning. If you were lucky, you were taught the why and how of taking notes.
But for the majority of us, the why and how were neglected and as a result, note taking felt more like a chore and a way to fill up binders of paper. I still have my old notebooks from high school and digital notes from college, but trying to review them isn’t helpful. Oftentimes, it’s just a fact or tidbit I wrote down as a way to help remember what I heard. In other cases, I wrote down too much and without a proper structure, which makes re-reading the notes for the main takeaways very difficult.
The tool was given, but the proper teaching and usage of it was not.
Now in an era of digital, it’s even easier to write notes. However, now the challenge is that easier does not always mean better. Just because I can type what my professor is saying at 100 words per minute does not mean I am learning it.
ClipNotes is a tool, and at the end of the day, it does not matter how great the tool is unless it is utilized properly.
My mission at ClipNotes is to unlock the learning potential of video - I’m doing it in two ways.
The first way is building the best tool for learning from videos.
The second way is this blog - where I’ll dive into educating myself and others how to use ClipNotes to learn anything they want.
Sign up for ClipNotes and start learning something new! And follow the blog to learn how to make that knowledge stick.
Happy Clipping!
- Chen
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