Just knowing what’s expected of you academically can be a tough challenge in college, particularly your freshman year. Often the A+, forward thinking students in high school can find it difficult to figure out how to step up from their A+ average in high school to a 4.0 in college. As challenging as this can be, more and more students are turning to the internet for help.

The web can provide you with vast amounts of resources to help you obtain and sustain top grades throughout your semesters in college. With the recent gravitation towards Open Access in education students are able to leverage their collective voice to better prepare for class and understand what is expected of them in college.

Real time collaboration and sharing platforms like GradeGuru a knowledge sharing network where college students share their course notes, study together, build their academic reputations and earn rewards are enabling more and more students to access information online and succeed in their courses.

Open Access in education is extremely useful to college students as it allows for:

• Crowd-sourcing your questions to classmates for help with a particular topic
• Accessing a classmate’s study guide to help prepare for an upcoming exam
• Feasibility of making group meetings through virtual study spaces

Online study spaces that allow for student interaction of this sort have the necessary tools in place to help make student study behaviors that much more productive.

At GradeGuru we based a lot of our development and design on student study habits to ensure that our interface was user-friendly. We incorporated many of the digital skills already in practice, for example, the ability to share your notes and collaborate academically on GradeGuru was based largely on the skills students use when they interact on Facebook and Twitter- just in an academic context.

We’ve continuously sought ways to incorporate the way college students interact with each other and study and formatted the site to make it that much easier for students to find there school through our university specific pages, find their courses through our course pages and find and share the study materials they need to prepare for their essays, assignments, and exams. We recently added to our site GradeGuru tools that feature our Citation Manager which collects citations for a student’s assignment automatically as they browse the web-simplifying the process.

With the vast amount of resources available to students there is a huge potential to find out exactly what is needed for students in their classes and for students to utilize this information to effectively manage their coursework and achieve high grades.