Welcome to Nota.
Your books just got smarter.

That statement was our aha! moment, our answer to a question that had been nagging us here at Handstand: “How can we make books... smarter?” Nota was developed to evolve any text beyond traditional print paradigms—and even beyond current reader technologies— to enable a book to be more than just a digitized version of itself.

“Nota is what surrounds a book to make it smarter so we can get smarter.”

Nota (Latin for “note”) can be videos or problem sets or links to relevant web pages—tabbed directly to the page. And since anyone can add nota as well as comments around them, the knowledge base around the ideas on that page continues to grow around the book.

Nota supports multiple types of learning styles and offers students the ability to contribute to the learning of others (peer-to-peer learning). With Nota, students are able to converse around ideas on every single page in a book. They are also able to vote up or down and flag various nota, as well as add comments, to promote “the best answers”. While many social learning modalities promote chats, few support chats directly around the media in a book. Peer-to-peer learning is a proven strategy in learning retention, and Nota supports this modality at the topic level.

Whether used in classrooms by teachers, or as a study aid by students, or as a corporate training tool or a tablet-based field guide, we wanted to create a learning tool that can truly evolve along with your teaching and learning needs.

Supporting STEM Learning for all.

Access to free, open educational resources (OER) is our passion. Finding quality education resources for free, however, can be a challenge for most students. Nota is poised to assist student learners at the high school, college and post-collegiate levels with our free STEM Fundamentals Catalog of textbooks to support all students, whether they are in a school-based program or not.

Our catalog is refined by editorial selection based on quality rubrics, and supports a variety of STEM subjects and grade levels, complete with rich video, web and problem sets to support deeper engagement with the learning material.

Numerous public and private organizations are sounding the alarm for significant investment in STEM-focused learning and STEM degree acquisition. Our commitment to launch with OER texts is supported by numerous school districts who are turning to free and open resources to support learning and reduce significant costs to districts. While we remain student-centered, and their right to access free and open learning materials, we believe that many districts who are leading the trend towards open access will find that these core OER texts are primed for adoption across many learning applications.