I built Rumin to solve my own problem – I love learning from different resources online: MOOCs, essays, e-Books on Kindle, educational videos on YouTube, Netflix documentaries etc.

But over time, I realize I have consumed a lot of content that I just can’t recall or make use of.

Not that I had a particular purpose in mind at the time of learning – it is often impossible to foresee how an idea can be applied in future contexts. I want to learn for the joy of it, while at the same time not have all the loose pieces of acquired knowledge go to waste.

I wanted something that provides:

• Passively capturing knowledge just in case, without breaking the flow in the learning context (e.g. switching tab from the MOOC I’m watching)
• Minimal maintenance effort required
• Flexibility for structuring knowledge to reflect how I think – NOT rigid folders/notebooks
• Visual workspace that provides the frictionlessness (and spatial arrangement) in fleshing out ideas, similar to sketching on paper

With the above in mind, I built Rumin. The current version has three main components:

• Visual workspace for navigating and editing connected ideas
• Capture with automatic information extraction via the browser extension: on pages such as edX, YouTube, Kindle etc.
• Auto-organizing with content suggestions

I have been dog-fooding it every day and find it very valuable to my learning process. Wanted to share it with the r/OnlineEducation community 🙂

Would to hear feedback on how this can improve your online learning experiences.

Happy learning!