The B-School Student Who Shared His Notes & Changed How The World Learns

In 2010, Poets&Quants published a profile of Don Jacobs, the legendary dean who spent a quarter century transforming Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University into one of the world’s great business schools. One of the stories that came through in that portrait was something Jacobs had experienced at a gathering of deans held at Case Western Reserve University in the early 1990s.

He had been explaining, with characteristic enthusiasm, the radical model of team-based learning he had woven into the Kellogg MBA – students not just sitting alongside each other but doing coursework together, graded together, rising and falling together. When he finished, MIT Sloan Dean Lester Thurow turned to him and offered a withering verdict. “At our school,” Thurow said matter-of-factly, “we consider that cheating.”

Jacobs saw something else entirely. He saw the future.

The idea that students could learn more by pooling their understanding, sharing their notes, interrogating each other’s assumptions and preparing for exams side by side was not, to Jacobs, a shortcut. It was a deeper engagement with knowledge.

THE ENGINEER WHO NEEDED MORE NOTES

A generation after Jacobs institutionalised that collaborative instinct at Kellogg, a Turin-born entrepreneur named Riccardo Ocleppo took the same core insight and scaled it into something that touches the academic lives of more than 20 million students across 180 countries. The platform is called Docsity. And Ocleppo, who holds a Master in Management from London Business School, built it from a simple, urgent, personal frustration.

Ocleppo grew up intellectually hungry. He pursued a Bachelor’s and then a Master’s in Electronics Engineering at Politecnico di Torino, one of Italy’s most rigorous technical universities, before adding further graduate study at Alta Scuola Politecnica. He was, by any measure, an excellent student. But excellent students, it turns out, are the most anxious about preparation. Ocleppo found himself constantly searching for more: more practice exams, more worked problems, more summaries of dense lecture material, more of the informal notes that his classmates had worked out in margins and on whiteboards. The official curriculum was not enough. What he needed was the collective intelligence of the student body around him, and he had no reliable way to access it.

That gap between what institutions provide and what students actually need to succeed is not unique to Politecnico di Torino. It is universal. And Ocleppo, who had already decided he wanted to be an entrepreneur, enrolled at London Business School’s Master in Management programme in 2009 partly to give himself the business fluency to do something about it.

LBS gave him the framework. His years in engineering had given him the problem. In 2010, back in Turin, he launched Docsity.

A SOCIAL NETWORK FOR STUDYING 

The concept was disarmingly simple: a platform where students could upload and share study materials – notes, summaries, past exam papers, exercise sets, lecture slides – and where others could access them. But what made Docsity stick, and eventually scale, was its architecture of reciprocity. Rather than a cash marketplace, Ocleppo built a points economy. Users earn credits by contributing quality materials; they spend those credits to download from others. The platform rewards generosity. It penalises free-riding. In other words, it works like the best study groups always have.

The materials that now live on Docsity – more than 11,000,000 of them, with roughly 10,000 new uploads every single day – span every conceivable subject across 22,000 institutions. The user base runs from high school students cramming for standardized tests to PhD candidates seeking supplementary material in narrow disciplines. The platform’s largest cohort is undergraduates, the students most likely to feel the gap between what their professors formally provide and what they need to genuinely master a subject.

Docsity operates in more than 180 countries and counts around 200,000 users active on the platform each day. That number sits behind the headline figure of 20-plus million registered users and speaks to a daily habit. Docsity is, for hundreds of thousands of students worldwide, simply part of how they study.

THE KELLOGG MODEL, WITHOUT BORDERS

Don Jacobs understood something that most academic institutions in the 1970s and 1980s resisted: that the workplace students were being prepared for was not a solo endeavor. Real problems, whether in finance, in medicine, in engineering, or in law are solved collaboratively. The MBA student who could only work in isolation was less prepared than the one who had learned to synthesise the thinking of a team. Jacobs built Kellogg around that conviction. He was so committed to it that he attached grades to team performance, not just individual output. Collaboration was not an option.

What Ocleppo has since done with Docsity is to let that same impulse operate freely, at global scale, beyond any single campus or curriculum. Docsity has no faculty, no admissions office, no tuition fees. It has students, and the materials they are willing to share with each other. The Kellogg model required a dean with vision and three decades of institutional will to implement. Docsity required an engineer with a personal frustration and a network connection.

Both Kellogg and Docsity rest on a belief about human nature that runs counter to the idea that knowledge hoarded is knowledge protected, that sharing is a zero-sum loss. Jacobs proved that was wrong inside a business school, and Ricardo Ocleppo has proved from Boston to Bangalore.

ADAPTIVE LEARNING FOR ALL

Most recently, Ocleppo has integrated artificial intelligence into the platform. Students can upload a study recording, a handwritten set of notes, a PDF or a YouTube link, and Docsity’s AI will generate structured summaries, concept maps, flashcards and practice quizzes. The platform has built accessibility features for students with ADHD and learning disabilities. It has expanded beyond documents into video courses and interactive Q&A. The act of sharing notes was only the beginning of what Ocleppo was building.

He has also moved beyond Docsity itself. In 2022, he founded OPIT – Open Institute of Technology, a fully accredited European higher education institution offering degrees in computer science, artificial intelligence, data science and cybersecurity entirely online. The same democratising impulse that gave birth to Docsity is now at work on credentials, and how to make the qualifications themselves accessible to students who cannot relocate to a campus or afford traditional tuition.

If he were still with us, Lester Thurow might be astonished by the extent to which the Sloan School of Management has embraced team-based learning, and how much knowledge MIT has made available to the world.

As for Don Jacobs, the argument he made that learning is inherently social, that students teach each other as much as professors teach them, and that collaboration is not a shortcut but the point, has never been more obviously correct. Every day, nearly a quarter of a million students log into Docsity to find notes written by a peer they will never meet, in a language they may not share, at a high school or university on the other side of the world.

What Thurow called cheating, it turns out, is just how people learn.

DON’T MISS DON JACOBS: WHY B-SCHOOLS HAVE TO LOWER THE PRICE OF AN MBA

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