Studying is usually easier when you're not doing it alone. If you and your classmates each take notes and make flashcards, everyone benefits when you pool that work, and Groups are how you do that in RemNote.
What is a group?
A Group is a shared space where you and your peers collect study documents around a course, module, or class. Once you've joined a group, you can add your own documents, browse what everyone else has shared, and save any of it into your own knowledge base. A group can be as small as you and a couple of friends swapping flashcards, or as large as your whole class or campus.
Everything shared in a group is read-only, so you never have to worry about someone editing your notes. If instead you want to write and edit documents together, you'll want a Shared Knowledge Base rather than a group.
Creating a Group
To create a group, click the name of your knowledge base in the top-left corner and select Groups. The menu that opens lists every group you're already part of and lets you create a new one. You can also reach all your groups any time at remnote.com/groups in the web version of RemNote.
Private and unlisted groups
There are two kinds of groups, and the difference is simply how people join them.
A private group can only be joined by invitation, sent to a specific email address. There's no other way in, so you stay in full control of exactly who's in the group. This is the right choice when you want to keep things to a known set of people.
An unlisted group is joined through an invite link. Anyone who has the link can join, which makes it easy to bring in a whole class at once: just drop the link in your group chat. It also means someone who joins the class later can let themselves in with the same link, without having to ask you for an invite.
You can switch a group between the two types at any time. Open the group's page, click the ... button, choose Edit, and change the type under the Access section. If you switch an unlisted group to private, its invite link stops working immediately, so you don't have to worry about anyone else wandering in afterward.
Inviting people to a group
To invite someone, open your group and click Invite members. You can do this as soon as you've created the group, or any time afterward.
In a private group, you'll enter the person's email address, and RemNote sends them an invitation with a link they can use to join right away.
In an unlisted group, that same Invite members button copies an invite link to your clipboard instead, ready to share however you like. If you invite someone who doesn't have a RemNote account yet, you'll both get a free month of RemNote Pro once they sign up and verify their account. See Referring Friends to RemNote for the details.
Managing invited members
To see who has joined your group, click the ... button on the group's page, then View all members. This opens a list of everyone in the group. Clicking a member's name opens their Profile page. See the Profiles article to learn how to customize your own.
If you're the group's creator (the Admin), you'll also see a Remove button next to each member's name that removes them from the group. We plan to add more granular role permissions for groups in future updates. If you're a member rather than the Admin, the ... button is also where you go to leave the group.
Sharing documents in a group
There are two ways to share a document with a group.
From the group's page, click Add Document and search for any document or folder in your knowledge base.
Or, while you're working in a document or folder, click the Share button in the top-right corner, choose to share to a group, and pick the group you want.
Either way, the document is shared read-only: other members can read it and save their own copy, but they can't change yours. If someone wants to build on what you shared, they can save a copy into their own knowledge base, edit it there, and share that back as a new document. (If what you really want is to work on a single document together, use a Shared Knowledge Base instead.)
If you later make changes to a document you've shared, re-share it to push the updated version to the group. Sharing Rems covers re-sharing and unsharing in more detail.
Saving documents to your knowledge base
When you click a document someone has shared in a group, it opens in a preview view. At the top, a flashcard preview section shows all the flashcards in the document, so you can flip through them and get in a quick practice round without saving anything. Below that, you can scroll through the full document, and if it has any sub-documents, you can open those too.
When you want to keep a document and study it properly, click the Save button. RemNote copies it into a Saved Documents folder in your own knowledge base, where it becomes an ordinary document you can move, edit, and organize however you like.
As you save, you can choose whether the flashcards come over active or paused. Saving with flashcards activated lets you start practicing immediately, while saving with flashcards paused gives you a copy with every card disabled, which is handy when you want to look the material over first or turn on only the cards you actually need.
Example use cases
Learning a language. Ask your teacher or classmates to share each lesson's new vocabulary after class. The full list of words is then always available to everyone, ready to save and start practicing with spaced repetition.
Splitting up exam prep. For a big exam that covers a lot of ground, divide the material among a few classmates and have each person share flashcards and notes for their part. Everyone can focus on their own section and still catch up quickly on the rest from what others have shared.
Running a class- or campus-wide group. With dozens or hundreds of members, a group is a natural place to post announcements, pass down the flashcard sets that helped previous years' students pass, or trade study tips.