Move Over Quizlet: Here's The Next Big Thing In Studying

Imagine a site that has documents and study aids for your specific classes. Meet Chase Dimond and Thomas Swalla -- some of the brains behind this enthralling concept. They are some of the people behind "world's largest study community" or StudyMode.com, but more specifically StudyMode Drive.

What is StudyMode, you may ask? According to their website, the people at StudyMode "want to help students like you get better grades." They do this by "building the technology to help students research and learn more efficiently." This is where Dimond comes in. The site has three parts: StudyMode Research, StudyMode Drive, and StudyMode Answers. He's behind StudyMode Drive.

As a recent graduate of Chapman University, Dimond knows what it is like to be a student in the "Information Age" where Google Drive can be a vital tool for studying. In August of 2015, StudyMode launched the free Drive portion of its site starting with SDSU. By October, the SDSU drive has almost 1,000 users and close to 1,500 documents from over 180 courses.

In an interview, Dimond and Swalla told Odyssey that as of Oct. 12, StudyMode Drive will have 40 new schools from all over the country. As of the beginning of October, schools with established drives include Cal Poly Pomona, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, CSU Long Beach, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara and other schools around the country. After the recent Oct. 12, launch, many more schools including UC Davis, UCLA, UC San Diego, USC, and dozens of schools across the nation will have drives; any school that doesn't have one can submit a request form. In addition to the colleges, within six months, high schools will be added, Swalla says.

The content uploaded by students is monitored in two ways. Firstly, Swalla says, the content is monitored by the community. They police the drive and are able to decide what quality content is. Secondly, StudyMode has an algorithm that crawls the content for certain words and phrases and is manually reviewed. They also work with TurnItIn in order to prevent plagiarism.

Swalla and Dimond said the main obstacle they are facing is getting the world out. They primarily use low-cost, innovative marketing techniques, or guerrilla marketing, like many up-and-coming companies. The more people that join and submit content, the more beneficial the site is so they encourage everyone to invite friends and peers. Users have access to the notes and study aids of anyone at their school who joins as opposed to just their friends and classmates which increases the resources available to them dramatically.

All you have to do to join is enter your email and submit documents. Although the site is still in its beginning stages, Thomas Swalla, Chase Dimond, and everyone at StudyMode are striving to create a community for learning and delivering value to students.

Now, it is up to you to join the community. You'll be able to say you joined something big before it exploded.