As a new year begins, the Bookshelf Online team has been reflecting on our goal of creating the best study center possible for our users. During 2017, we took our reader and added robust study tools going beyond notes and highlights, including: integrations with Wikipedia and Microsoft OneNote, labs geared towards our power-users, simplified sharing of notes and highlights, and a design refresh to make our site more intuitive. All of this was done in an effort to help users learn their content and create the best interactive study center possible.

While we are pleased with the work we did in 2017, we are more excited to continue the upgrades to the student experience in 2018.

Up first for the new year: Flashcards, which will be launching in the coming weeks.

Flashcards joins our Review Mode feature as a study tool focusing on targeted review of course content. While Review Mode help students learn difficult concepts by putting the user in a unique view designed to review notes and highlights in line with the text, Flashcards puts students in a quiz-like environment for review of user-created cards.

Flashcards utilize a key tenant of learning science: the retrieval practice (or, as I like to say, “the testing effect.”) This basically means, learners better retain and repeat information by simulating a quiz-like environment. Users will be able to create flashcards by highlighting text, copying book content or creating their own summaries for a custom-tailored study session. We don’t limit cards to the content in the book: if a student wants to create additional cards based on articles or other primary source documents, they can add them to their flashcards in Bookshelf.

Any student who uses them knows flashcards are a useful study tool (science says so!). No more accidentally spilling coffee all over them right before finals and having to rewrite them. Or having to laminate the flashcards because the dog wanted a light late-night snack. Now is the time to ditch paper flashcards for Bookshelf’s new integrated quizzing tool and leave those worries in the past. Consider it a useful New Year’s gift from the Bookshelf team and happy reading in 2018!