To provide tools to help college students collaborate in and out of the lecture hall with peers and instructers alike. It is easy to begin taking class notes online. Just register, find or create your courses, and share the link with your classmates.
In addition to realtime collaborative note-taking, you can ask questions for your peers to promote or answer. While you use our tools, bear in mind that FinalsClub is a non-profit, free and open source project. Please be patient and let us know how we can improve our products. Only together can we digitize higher education, one lecture at a time.
Please browse our archive of past courses covered at Harvard, Brown, and Harvard Law School from 2008 through 2010.
This directive is deliberately vague to
accommodate creative humor, insight, and exploration.
Disruptive or irrelevant material, however,
will be subject to removal.
Just keep it academic, and we'll all be better off.
Please feel free to contact us regarding any questions that you may have.
Mail Address: Finalsclub.org
1132 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Thank you for your interest in FinalsClub.org and our community of volunteer developers, organizers, and scholars. Although we come from diverse backgrounds, each of us is committed to open education. Just as some of us struggle to remember the world before Wikipedia, we also look forward to a time in the not-too-distant future when people will no longer fathom a world without free and open education for everyone. Although we have an ambitious goal for a small team of believers ranging from nineteen to seventy years old, we believe we can succeed. But before we can open the ivory tower to curious minds everywhere, we will need your help.
Andrew is an entrepreneur and a dreamer. He is also the reason FinalsClub exists today, but he also recognizes that the success of this project depends more on its student contributors than its founder. Since the creation of the first site in 2008, Andrew has remained committed to the cause of open education without distraction. If you are looking to join our team, Andrew is the person to talk to for inspiration and enthusiasm. When he is not teaching, tutoring, or being a social entrepreneur, Andrew is a writer and avid practitioner of Italian Yoga.
Seth is a professional web developer, education technologist, and free and open source enthusiast. Over the past three years, Seth has been employed in the field of open source educational technology with One Laptop Per Child, the Harvard Berkman Center's Web Ecology Project, and OneVille. Now we are happy to have Seth leading software development here at FinalsClub.org.
During his day job at the Free Software Foundation, Josh is an avid believer in free and open source software. His interest in open education has also brought his expertise to other projects such as TextbookRevolution.org and CK12.org. Now he lives in Cambridge, MA and dedicates his spare cycles to charting the course of our development team and helping to strategize our community organizing efforts. When not working or writing free and open source software, Josh likes to play squash. Care to challenge him to a match?
Bob is our heroic systems administrator. His task is to make sure your knowledge stays safe and secure from all manner of malware, hacker, or system failure. His enthusiasm and passion for secure passwords is unrelenting. In short, your knowledge is safe with him. When he isn't busy debugging or encrypting, Bob is likely contributing to free and open source software projects (even though he should be studying for his college mid terms).
If you are reading this, you likely have one question in mind: What's up with this site? Based on the subtle "About" link you followed here, it would seem that someone claims to have an answer. For the time being, that someone is me, the site's founder. I don't, however, have all the answers. Over the past three years, I've done a lot of thinking about collaborative learning, the Internet, and this website, but I do not wish to impose all of my preconceptions on you. While I will share the vision that inspired this project, I defer to you to complete - or better, to improve upon - what I've started.
I have been a tutor since I was fourteen years old. I have taught every conceivable demographic from prep schoolers to juvenile prisoners. Sometimes I have been paid; other times I've volunteered. In short, I love teaching and I feel that a certain level of education should be free to everyone. As a result, I have always balanced my paid and pro bono work.
After starting a boutique tutoring firm, Veritas Tutors, in 2005, I soon decided to increase my commitment to public education in accord with the growth of my company. With my mornings generally free, I also seized the opportunity to audit a number of classes on the Harvard campus.
Loitering in the back of lecture halls with the other intellectual ne'er-do-wells of Harvard Square, I realized my flexible schedule and geographic proximity alone afforded me the privilege of world-class academic enrichment. I also thought, "Why shouldn't those less free to indulge in leisurely midday contemplation be afforded the same opportunity?"
Soon after that epiphany, my first academic blog, based on "The Art and Thought of the Cold War", was published on a homebrewed website in the Fall of 2005. After each lecture, I would scurry to a coffee shop to organize, summarize, and analyze what I'd learned. Even though my readership was minimal, the process of learning without the burden of exams or papers was fantastic. That is, until the professor learned of my actions and demanded that I cease writing and remove the blog from public view. Shocked and disappointed, I complied. I also resolved to revive the project at some point in the future.
Two years of contemplation later, the first version of this website launched with four annotated books and five course blogs, which I took care to edit and pre-approve with a combination of diplomacy and obeisance to each professor. With relative success on and off campus, I have continued efforts to expand the site into the collaborative learning environment that currently exists.
This site is straightforward. Its three fundamental features involve annotations, courses, and groups with all information shared under a Creative Commons Copyright in compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Please read our (official copyright policy [link]) for more information.
Specifically, annotations constitute observations a great tutor would make if you read a book side-by-side. Courses involve lecture-by-lecture op-eds written by enrolled students. Finally, groups are forums for organizing, collaborating, and sharing knowledge garnered inside or outside the ivory tower of academia. To view a sample group, please (click here [link]).
Thanks to several intrepid scholars, the site already includes ample content to read, contemplate, and augment. If you are a student at [one of our participating universities (link)], you have benefited or likely will benefit from this existing content. In exchange, I simply ask you to contribute in kind.
If you like what you read, vote it up; if you have a relevant comment, post it; and if you have the opportunity, join or create a study group to share your coursework with the world.
Until now, I have been responsible for everything that appears on the website. I have engaged, edited, and overseen the creation of all technology and content. However, the success of this site has nothing to do with past accomplishments or future innovation. Rather, the success of this site depends on you, readers and contributors, and your commitment to academic openness. I have created the forum and crafted examples, but you must determine the rest.
Students, teachers, and curious minds the world over have already found this site to be invaluable. Moreover, people are beginning to recognize that educational equality and open access to information constitute two of the Internet's greatest (and yet unrealized) promises. With a widespread effort, we can forever alter the landscape of education.
For now, I've done my small part; the rest is up to you.
Optimistically yours,
Andrew Magliozzi
Founder
FinalsClub.org
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December 13, 2009
Plenty of Harvard graduates have traded on the fame and prestige of their alma mater, but few have done so the way Andrew Magliozzi has. The year he graduated, 2005, he started a tutoring company located steps from Harvard Yard, with a name, Veritas, that is the motto of his storied alma mater.
Then, two years ago, Magliozzi started up a side project called Finalsclub.org.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
A rapidly growing course preparatory Web site, FinalsClub.org, is moving forward with a plan to expand its site in spite of controversy over the legality of the venture.
The Web site, which allows students to share notes, create study groups, and blog about lectures and sections, recently hired 10 Harvard College students to serve as BETA testers for the site.
September 27th, 2009
Computer Science professor and former Dean of Harvard, Harry Lewis, embraces FinalsClub's work and its guiding principle of open education. Even as Harvard University has not been wholly sympathetic to the FinalsClub mission, invoking the Copyright Act of 1976, assuming a similar position to other major institutions such as University of Texas, Lewis supports working towards the proverbial "temple of the free exchange of ideas." A course he taught in the Harvard Extension School was also shared freely online.
