ZNotes

ZNotes is fighting educational inequality for young people everywhere. High-stakes, end of school exams are entrenched in educational inequality due to (a) lack of relevant high-quality resources, (b) disparities in teaching quality and (c) financial burden to receive personalised support. Students all over the world take the same international examinations but face entirely uneven educational experiences. In the UK, a child from a disadvantaged background is 18 months behind when they take their GCSEs (Education Policy Institute, 2019). And internationally, in low-income countries, 46% of the resources went to the top 10% of students with the highest levels of education (UNICEF, 2020). Private tuition, underfunded schools, oversized classrooms, and unequal distribution of resources create massive barriers to attainment. And if you live in a developing nation where the education system is under-resourced, these inequalities are further exacerbated. Suddenly, this formal exam system is an incredibly unfair playing field.

The accessibility of education underpins many exacerbating inequalities. International qualifications at the end of high school are pivotal to the opportunities that can be accessed and trajectories to be followed. For many, it is the only possibility for them to apply for scholarships and universities abroad. There is an increasing demand for pursuing international qualifications and according to Forbes (2021), the international schools market will hit $89bn by 2026. 

ZNotes is a community-led online learning platform providing free access to high-quality educational resources combined with a peer-learning environment. ZNotes enables students to maximise their potential with unlimited access to resources and be empowered to become the producers and distributors of educational resources. By identifying high-achieving students, ZNotes co-creates moderated educational resources targeted to specific curricula and publish it through a globally accessible learning platform.

We aim to accelerate our mission through offering:

1. Free revision notes: concise and syllabus-specific revision notes written for students, by students. 

2. Live learning experiences: through ZNotes Live we offer a platform for leaders and pioneers in academia, entrepreneurship and sustainability across the globe to equip students with the skills and knowledge to change the world. 

3. Live podcasts: offers insight into potential careers, different university experiences and building a business from experts all over the world. 

4. Student-led newsletters: provide a platform for our community to share their learning experiences. 

5. Peer-to-peer learning space: through subject channels and group sessions on our Discord, the  ZNotes learning community connects students globally, allowing them to share, explore, learn and grow through supporting each other. 

ZNotes’s bespoke technological solution provides a robust infrastructure that combines multiple educational features and personalisation aspects to learners while being highly scalable. By leveraging technology and through the empowerment of learners, the model is a cost-effective yet, immediately impactful way to improve academic outcomes and make a positive social impact. 

By providing access to the resources and support needed to complete English-medium international high school qualifications, we enable access to education for 14-18 year old students and, particularly for those who may be left behind. This may be due to unrecognised/weak national education systems or those displaced from their home countries in the current global crises and having to pursue alternative curriculums.  To date, we have over 120k registered users since launching our new platform in September 2020.

The success of ZNotes in the international space has been due to the insider knowledge that the founding team possessed. Another important aspect is that the impact realised is seen in both the users accessing the content as well as those creating it. The latter have deeper exposure to entrepreneurial skills and a global change-making attitude. In the sample of past ZNotes interns, we’ve seen outcomes such as receiving scholarships to top universities, launching start-ups and leap-frogging career trajectories. Though this sample is relatively smaller than total users, the impact is vast and therefore critical to allow more young people to be involved in running youth-led initiatives.

ZNotes began with a single student’s revision notes and efforts to run the website, to now having more than 100 contributors and a team of 30 volunteers who support the day to day activities. 

The greatest reason for the exponential growth of ZNotes has been the empowerment of youth and taking a community-led approach. As such, each team member is able to contribute to the decision and direction of the organization whether it is through setting up initiatives, sharing their ideas across teams in our regular town hall meetings.

The organisation has evolved into 5 subteams each with their own lead: content, community, tech, growth and outreach each of which has a robust support structure including regular check-ins, a knowledge base of tutorials and a culture book to induct new team members.  Further, the Leadership Team is composed of the CEO, COO and CSO. 

• Zubair Junjunia - CEO: Diana Legacy Award 2021 Winner and a University College London graduate.

• Oliver Dunnet - COO: Studying Economics and Management at the University of Oxford.

• Maimoona Junjunia - CSO: Studying Business Management at King’s College London

The advisory board is made up of past team members who have deep knowledge of the workings of ZNotes and leaders of other youth-led projects and social impact start-ups. The board meets every 2 months and is attended by the  CEO,  COO  and  CSO.  This group of people provide space and critical advice to ensure the projects initiated in the organisation are aligned to the mission and end up successful.

The CEO, Zubair is also the chairman of the ZNotes Foundation board which meets on a quarterly basis. This board is made up of professionals in the fields of education,  law, accounting, and ensures that the legal obligations of the organisation are met.

Mentorship has been key to the growth and success that we have achieved. Our approaches and directions have benefited from industry-leaders and academics. The particular areas we want to focus on include networking opportunities for partnerships with corporates and universities, supporting human resources and technical capabilities and knowledge from those with on-the-ground knowledge.

Having been through the application process of MIT Solve Youth Innovation Challenge and being selected as the top 20 finalists gave us the opportunity to interact and meet others in similar entrepreneurial trajectories. Although we were unable to reach the finalists stage, the opportunity of sharing ideas with and receiving support from the panelling judges and those involved enabled us to expand our social network and find relevant contacts.

There is a sharp distinction between the materials available openly and at high premiums in the international education market. Tailored and high-quality content in the form of private tutoring and resources is often not accessible for a large proportion of students, leading to inequality. 

Although there are some great educational platforms providing open content, they are often generalised and do not follow the exact syllabi. Peer-reviewed, openly accessible, written by high-achieving students with notes tailored to specific exams, ZNotes tackles this challenge. Additionally, the community-led approach brings a high level of relatability to students and space to engage in peer-to-peer learning, a combination unique to it.

Moreover, ZNotes’s bespoke technological solution provides a robust infrastructure that combines multiple educational features and personalisation aspects to learners while being highly scalable. This organisational structure combined with a unique technological solution provides us with the ability to continue to scale our offerings into further subjects and exam boards to reach more students globally. 

With the changing landscape of international education and assessments, it is imperative for us to be more attached to our philosophy than a specific offering. As such, over the next five years, we aim to continue to strengthen our platform with its intrinsic self-organised community-led infrastructure. This means we will continue to work alongside our community to build features and form novel resource types for our users to engage and contribute towards. 

We envision being the one-stop destination for students at every level pursuing formal examinations and looking for resources and community to support them.

To achieve our social mission, we must continue to expand our reach and provide further support to each of our learners. Our strategy to increase the support of new exams and subjects is by partnering with NGOs and schools in specific education systems and leveraging their high-achieving student base to write and grow the content. We have been able to increase our capacity for content development by having a bespoke technological platform catering to our needs, a robust process of application induction and moderation, and a growing team of interns who support this operation. 

In the long term, ZNotes will have steady revenue streams through licensing and sponsorships. To further personalise the revision experience, a system will be integrated to identify profiles and suggest improved materials and learning methods. We will also continue to expand our notes content by including more international exam boards and subjects to make our platform more inclusive for students globally. 

We critically assess the impact our offerings have had. This includes academic progress, social capital redistribution and the development of global change-making attitude and entrepreneurial spirit. We have increasing levels of influence on those involved with ZNotes from the website visitors to those who contribute and become team members. We expect a certain level of commitment from our interns and so it is imperative that they receive a highly educational and rewarding experience during their time with us. We monitor the development and progress of each influence sphere through pre and post surveying. 

Our Social Impact Analyst maintains a metrics dashboard on Notion that include 30 unique processes and reach metrics. This dashboard makes sure we are maintaining and increasing our growth rate as well as keeping all of our team members engaged and motivated.  In addition, we receive feedback on specific events through feedback forms that we disseminate. Finally, we receive testimonials in the form of text and video on the community and the impact of resources on individual educational outcomes. 

We are currently developing the ZNotes theory of change model, validated through pre- and post-surveys run on the Discord server followed by the development of an API that allows for the corpus to be fielded and tagged in the academic subject channels. We have achieved partner status on our server with more than 11,000 members and this would be the space to explore further questions on self-organised learning communities.

The ZNotes Theory of Change looks at the footprint ZNotes © work has on the educational planet from both a top-down satellite view: looking at how ZNotes impacts the educational sector as a whole and a more bottom-up approach: of why this footprint is shaped in such a way and how long this imprint may last. 

ZNotes fosters a community-led and student centred approach to tackle educational inequality. By identifying high-achieving students, ZNotes can co-create moderated educational resources in text and video form that are targeted to specific curricula and syllabi. These supplemental resources are combined with the students’ ability to engage with other students in similar academic trajectories to receive more personalised academic and social support through our peer-learning platform. As a youth-led movement, ZNotes considers the impact witnessed at all points in the organisation - from those furthest removed, benefiting only from limited engagement with static content; to those closer to the main operations of the organisation; such as contributors and our integral interns. 

As various offerings and processes have evolved since its inception in 2014, our detailed theory of change model describes the emergence of four distinct populations (users, community members, contributors and team members), how each benefits from the interventions categorised in five interconnected pathways (learning platform, extracurricular, community, contributor and internship), and the resulting 6 outcomes we wish to see:

1. Improvement in academic performance and confidence,

2. Increased access to quality tertiary education

3. Increased community engagement and service

4. Increased readiness for professional opportunities 

5. Increased interest in pursuing global social development 

6. Increased social networks

By considering assumptions made in arguments for change and considering the impacts of external factors, we have recently worked on detailed account of our interventions and outcomes, backed by peer-reviewed academic journals to identify the educational change ZNotes is having. A summary diagram of our Theory of Change is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jiei7Qr-o4lRkJVtwbyNeNexFvGCR1iG/view?usp=sharing

We have invested countless hours in developing a bespoke technological solution that provides a robust infrastructure that combines multiple educational features and personalisation aspects to learners while being highly scalable. This includes the development and advancement of new features on our platform such as enabling users to tag relevant resources to the revision notes from various sources on the internet. This builds a categorised and handpicked resource bank for other students to learn from. In addition to this, the content contribution process has become more seamless in that contributors are given access to change/update notes directly on the online learning platform.

Moving from a historically static website to a dynamic and accessible learning platform, we converted all our content from PDFs into a raw, markdown format stored in globally distributed databases. In the last few months, we have also decoupled our front-end and back-end technologies so each runs independently. This means that our infrastructure allows us to develop alternate applications and software that can make API calls to retrieve ZNotes content. 

To truly tackle the challenge of educational inequality, it is critical that our support is available to every segment of the global population. We are in a strong and technologically stable position to start the development of a low-bandwidth, lightweight and legacy-friendly mobile application to access educational content offline. By partnering with organizations that are working specifically in these communities, we can accelerate our impact and reach. 

Contributing and interning at ZNotes means having an active role in accelerating our mission to end education inequality for young people. Our international team consists of many diverse nationalities, cultures, and perspectives; all united by our common belief of increasing access to quality education. With a team-based all around the world, we have been working remotely since day. Our main team communication platform is Discord used in conjunction with Notion for wikis & project management, GSuite, and other division-specific tools. Departments coordinate efforts and catch up with short weekly stand-up meetings. Most team members are in full-time education and thus understand each other well. Our team culture is friendly and collaborative; encouraging open communication and creative problem-solving.

We monitor the development and progress of each influence sphere through contributor and intern, pre and post surveying. The results indicate: 87% said working with znotes allowed them to engage with a larger diversity of people, and 100% said they would score the benefits and impacts of znotes moderately high to very high.

A testimonial from one of our past team members: “ZNotes is more than just a team, it's a family. Working with a diverse group of people from all over the world in a fast-paced innovative environment was inspiring. At ZNotes there was always innovation, but tons of support from the team. As a developer I enjoyed both my work and the amazing community events. Will truly miss working here!” - Arnav Jindal

To adhere to our social mission, ZNotes is committed to never placing a paywall against students. One of our main revenue streams are integrated Google AdSense natively into the learning platform. Students can go ad-free with a donation of any amount. We have over 120,000 registered users on our website and 65,000 monthly active users (MAU). We have invested countless hours in developing a bespoke technological solution that provides a robust infrastructure that combines multiple educational features and personalisation aspects to learners. 

After receiving 30,000 USD grant funding from Facebook in 2019, we managed to rapidly improve our software and cover the expenses for experiments. However, it also made us realize the necessity of being financially sustainable to be able to innovate and deliver the very best possible service. Historically, ZNotes has been financed with advertising on the website. With our high traffic, this was able to cover our hosting costs.

ZNotes aims to grow and continue addressing educational inequality by: (1) improving the learning experience with further personalisation tools on the platform for current users and (2) implement the model in globally under-resourced national education systems.

Moving forward, we are in the progress to diversifying our revenue streams through a four-pronged approach:

1. Corporate & University Sponsorship: Providing spaces on the platform and community for corporates to share their messaging and fulfill CSR objectives as well as university outreach to prospective students.

2. Regional Programs: Launching ZNotes for national curricula with the support of local Ministry of Education and headlining corporate sponsor.

3. Referral Fees: Negotiating with premium education services for discounted offerings to the community & a commission.

4. Grants: As our work is very clearly pursuing our social mission and having set up the not-for-profit, ZNotes Foundation, as part of our corporate structure, we are approaching grant funding organizations to support our work.

We are now working towards our goal of implementing the ZNotes model in a national education system. We are coordinating our first regional partnership deal with a gulf country, alongside one of the largest assessment bodies in the world. 

We are currently in discussion with Buffalo Grid; a startup that is developing technology to make knowledge accessible to the most unconnected parts of the world in East Africa and the Middle-East. Through this partnership, we are hoping to bring our content available to help those beyond the digital divide and truly embody our mission of addressing inequalities. 

An ongoing partnership we have is with UNESCO World Higher Education Conference (WHEC), engaging with their youth strategy. Specifically, by running focus group discussions to gather insights and engaging with their in-person events.

We have achieved partner status on our Discord server with more than 11,000 members and this would be the space to explore further questions on self-organised learning communities.