Slides are written as prompts for the speaker, not as a textbook. A bullet like “Frank-Starling mechanism” or “elasticity of demand” assumes you heard the explanation that went with it. Studying from slides alone tends to produce recognition (“I have seen this”) rather than understanding (“I can explain this”), and exams test the second. The fix is to pair the deck with the lecture itself: the recording supplies the reasoning and examples, and the slides supply the structure and diagrams.

NoteTube combines both in one study session, so the notes it writes follow the slide order but include what your professor actually said.

NoteTube accepts PDF rather than .pptx files, so there is one extra step:

1. Open the deck in PowerPoint or Keynote and choose File → Export (or Save As) → PDF.
2. Upload the PDF to a new NoteTube study session.
3. Optionally add the lecture recording or video to the same session (Pro).
4. Generate notes, then flashcards and a quiz from the combined material.

Re-reading feels productive but mostly builds familiarity, not recall. A landmark review of ten common study techniques rated only two as “high utility”: practice testing and distributed (spaced) practice, while re-reading and highlighting were rated low utility (Dunlosky et al., 2013). In a classic experiment, students who took a recall test on a passage remembered more of it a week later than students who spent the same time re-studying it, even though the re-studiers felt more confident right after (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).

That is why NoteTube turns each lecture into flashcards scheduled with the SM-2 spaced-repetition algorithm and quizzes you can retake. Instead of re-reading a transcript the night before the exam, you answer questions drawn from the lecture across several days, which is the review pattern the research favors.