Shiva Sharad Pillai was preparing for his Class 10 exams in Dubai when he stumbled upon the idea of a notes sharing platform. Though it was conceived as a forum to share notes on various subjects among his batchmates, Backnotes, the educational start-up he founded, now offers hundreds of pages of free content to students across the world.
The website has over 20,000 lifetime users from 143 different countries and nearly one lakh page views. “In early 2020, while discussing computer science paper with my friends, we realised that many others wanted the material we used. I built most of the site myself and it is completely managed by students in the age group of 14 to 19 years,” says Shiva.
backnotes.com, a student-run online notes centre, has around 350 plus webpages and the global community of young contributors basically combs the world to create their own quality notes.
“Starting on March 2020 with three people, now we have around 75 contributors across three different board exams. We cross-check the material between ourselves and ensure that no part is plagiarised from some other source,” he says.
During the pandemic, the team also aimed to provide extracurricular activities such as internships, volunteering opportunities, and more. “Students with various skills have been roped in to work as writers, editors, marketing experts and digital artists,” he adds.
While the team of contributors include students from India, UAE, Sri Lanka, Australia, Hungary, Jamaica, Italy, Greece, UK, their expansions plans include CBSE/ICSE notes, co-curricular activities like coding and software skills development.
Apart from being a platform for IGCSE, AS/A, and MYP4-5 students, the website’s discord server provides a safe space for students to hangout and seek help with their academics and future plans.
“The feedback has been great and we have been told that our website is much better than some paid ones. At present we have nearly 1,000 members. We are also building an edu-lifestyle related app for IB students with a team from 3 different countries,” he says.
