Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

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Organization  Updated 2025-07-16  +Created 1970-01-01

OurBigBook.com / University lecture notes  Updated 2025-07-16  +Created 1970-01-01

Basically everything that applies to the blogs section also applies here, but university lecture notes are so important to us that they deserve a bit more talk.

It is arguable that this is currently the best way to learn any university subject, and that it can already be used to learn any subject.

We basically just want to make the process more efficient and enjoyable, by making it easier:

to find what you want based on an initial subject hit across the best version of any author
and to publish your own stuff with one click, and get feedback if people like it or not, and improvement suggestions like you do you GitHub

One major problem with lecture notes is that, as the name suggests, they are merely a complement to the lecture, and don't contain enough detail for you to really learn solely from them without watching the lecture.

The only texts that generally teach in enough depth are actual books, which are almost always commercial.

So in a sense, this project can be seen as a path to upgrade free lecture notes into full blown free books, from which you can learn from scratch without any external material.

And a major way in which we believe this can be done is through the reuse of sections of lecture notes by from other universities, which greatly reduces the useless effort of writing things from scratch.

The intended mental picture is clear: the topics feature docs.ourbigbook.com/#ourbigbook-web-topics will is intended to act as the missing horizontal topic integration across lecture notes of specific universities, e.g:

MIT calculus course             UCLA calculus course

* Calculus                <---> * Calculus
  * Limit                 <--->   * Limit
    * Limit of a function
    * Limit of a series   <--->     * Limit of a series
  * Derivative            <--->   * Derivative
                                    * L'Hôpital's rule
  * Integral              <--->   * Integral

Figure 1.
Example topics page of OurBigBook.com
.

One important advantage of lecture notes is that since they are written by the teacher, they should match exactly what "students are supposed to learn to get good grades", which unfortunately is a major motivation for student's learning weather we want it or not.

One big open question for this project is to what extent notes written for lectures at one university will be relevant to the lectures at another university?

Is it possible to write notes in a way that they are naturally reusable?

It is our gut feeling that this is possible. But it almost certainly requires an small intentional effort on the part of authors.

The question then becomes whether the "become famous by getting your content viewed in other universities" factor is strong enough to attract users.

And we believe that it might, it just might be.